The materials for a “Life of Warburton” have been arranged by Mr. Nichols with his accustomed fidelity.—See his Literary Anecdotes.

It is probable I may have drawn my meteor from our volcanic author himself, who had his lucid moments, even in the deliriums of his imagination. Warburton has rightly observed, in his “Divine Legation,” p. 203, that “Systems, Schemes, and Hypotheses, all bred of heat, in the warm regions of Controversy, like meteors in a troubled sky, have each its turn to blaze and fly away.”

It seems, even by the confession of a Warburtonian, that his master was of “a human size;” for when Bishop Lowth rallies the Warburtonians for their subserviency and credulity to their master, he aimed a gentle stroke at Dr. Brown, who, in his “Essays on the Characteristics,” had poured forth the most vehement panegyric. In his “Estimate of Manners of the Times,” too, after a long tirade of their badness in regard to taste and learning, he thus again eulogizes his mighty master:—“Himself is abused, and his friends insulted for his sake, by those who never read his writings; or, if they did, could neither taste nor comprehend them; while every little aspiring or despairing scribbler eyes him as Cassius did CÆsar: and whispers to his fellow—

No wonder, then, if the malice of the Lilliputian tribe be bent against this dreaded Gulliver; if they attack him with poisoned arrows, whom they cannot subdue by strength.”

On this Lowth observes, that “this Lord Paramount in his pretensions doth bestride the narrow world of literature, and has cast out his shoe over all the regions of science.” This leads to a ludicrous comparison of Warburton, with King Pichrochole and his three ministers, who, in Urquhart’s admirable version of the French wit, are Count Merdaille, the Duke of Smalltrash, and the Earl Swashbuckler, who set up for universal monarchy, and made an imaginary expedition through all the quarters of the world, as Rabelais records, and the bishop facetiously quotes. Dr. Brown afterwards seemed to repent his panegyric, and contrives to make his gigantic hero shrink into a moderate size. “I believe still, every little aspiring fellow continues thus to eye him. For myself, I have ever considered him as a man, yet considerable among his species, as the following part of the paragraph clearly demonstrates. I speak of him here as a Gulliver indeed; yet still of no more than human size, and only apprehended to be of colossal magnitude by certain of his Lilliputian enemies.” Thus subtilely would poor Dr. Brown save appearances! It must be confessed that, in a dilemma, never was a giant got rid of so easily!—The plain truth, however, was, that Brown was then on the point of quarrelling with Warburton; for he laments, in a letter to a friend, that “he had not avoided all personal panegyric. I had thus saved myself the trouble of setting right a character which I far over-painted.” A part of this letter is quoted in the “Biographia Britannica.”

“Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the collections of their respective works,” itself a collection which our shelves could ill spare, though maliciously republished by Dr. Parr. The dedication by Parr stands unparalleled for comparative criticism. It is the eruption of a volcano; it sparkles, it blazes, and scatters light and destruction. How deeply ought we to regret that this Nazarite suffered his strength to be shorn by the Delilahs of spurious fame. Never did this man, with his gifted strength, grasp the pillars of a temple, to shake its atoms over Philistines; but pleased the childlike simplicity of his mind by pulling down houses over the heads of their unlucky inhabitants. He consumed, in local and personal literary quarrels, a genius which might have made the next age his own. With all the stores of erudition, and all the eloquence of genius, he mortified a country parson for his politics, and a London accoucheur for certain obstetrical labours performed on Horace; and now his collected writings lie before us, volumes unsaleable and unread. His insatiate vanity was so little delicate, as often to snatch its sweetmeat from a foul plate; it now appears, by the secret revelations in Griffith’s own copy of his “Monthly Review,” that the writer of a very elaborate article on the works of Dr. Parr, was no less a personage than the Doctor himself. His egotism was so declamatory, that it unnaturalized a great mind, by the distortions of Johnsonian mimicry; his fierceness, which was pushed on to brutality on the unresisting, retreated with a child’s terrors when resisted; and the pomp of petty pride in table triumphs and evening circles, ill compensated for the lost century he might have made his own!

The “Quarterly Review,” vol. vii. p. 383.—So masterly a piece of criticism has rarely surprised the public in the leaves of a periodical publication. It comes, indeed, with the feelings of another age, and the reminiscences of the old and vigorous school. I cannot implicitly adopt all the sentiments of the critic, but it exhibits a highly-finished portrait, enamelled by the love of the artist.—This article was written by the late Dr. Whitaker, the historian of Craven, &c.

When Warburton, sore at having been refused academical honours at Oxford, which were offered to Pope, then his fellow-traveller, and who, in consequence of this refusal, did himself not accept them—in his controversy with Lowth (then the Oxford Professor), gave way to his angry spirit, and struck at the University itself, for its political jesuitism, being a place where men “were taught to distinguish between de facto and de jure,” caustic was the retort. Lowth, by singular felicity of application, touched on Warburton’s original designation, in a character he hit on in Clarendon. After remonstrating with spirit and dignity on this petulant attack, which was not merely personal, Lowth continues:—“Had I not your lordship’s example to justify me, I should think it a piece of extreme impertinence to inquire where YOU were bred; though one might justly plead, in excuse for it, a natural curiosity to know where and how such a phenomenon was produced. It is commonly said that your lordship’s education was of that particular kind, concerning which it is a remark of that great judge of men and manners, Lord Clarendon (on whom you have, therefore, with a wonderful happiness of allusion, justness of application, and elegance of expression, conferred ‘the unrivalled title of the Chancellor of Human Nature’), that it peculiarly disposes men to be proud, insolent, and pragmatical.” Lowth, in a note, inserts Clarendon’s character of Colonel Harrison: “He had been bred up in the place of a clerk, under a lawyer of good account in those parts; which kind of education introduces men into the language and practice of business; and if it be not resisted by the great ingenuity of the person, inclines young men to more pride than any other kind of breeding, and disposes them to be pragmatical and insolent.” “Now, my lord (Lowth continues), as you have in your whole behaviour, and in all your writings, remarkably distinguished yourself by your humility, lenity, meekness, forbearance, candour, humanity, civility, decency, good manners, good temper, moderation with regard to the opinions of others, and a modest diffidence of your own, this unpromising circumstance of your education is so far from being a disgrace to you, that it highly redounds to your praise.”—Lowth’s Letter to the Author of the D.L. p. 63.

Was ever weapon more polished and keen? This Attic style of controversy finely contrasts with the tasteless and fierce invective of the Warburtonians, although one of them is well known to have managed too adroitly the cutting instrument of irony; but the frigid malignancy of Hurd diminishes the pleasure we might find in his skill. Warburton ill concealed his vexation in the contempt he vented in a letter to Hurd on this occasion. “All you say about Lowth’s pamphlet breathes the purest spirit of friendship. His wit and his reasoning, God knows, and I also, (as a certain critic said once in a matter of the like great importance), are much below the qualities that deserve those names.”—He writes too of “this man’s boldness in publishing his letters.”—“If he expects an answer, he will certainly find himself disappointed; though I believe I could make as good sport with this devil of a vice, for the public diversion, as ever was made with him in the old Moralities.”—But Warburton did reply! Had he ever possessed one feeling of taste, never would he have figured the elegant Lowth as this grotesque personage. He was, however, at that moment sharply stung!

This circumstance of Attorneyship was not passed over in Mallet’s “Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living.” Comparing, in the Spirit of “familiarity,” Arnall, an impudent scribbling attorney and political scribe, with Warburton, he says, “You have been an attorney as well as he, but a little more impudent than he was; for Arnall never presumed to conceal his turpitude under the gown and the scarf.” But this is mere invective!

I have given a tempered opinion of his motive for this sudden conversion from Attorneyship to Divinity; for it must not be concealed, in our inquiry into Warburton’s character, that he has frequently been accused of a more worldly one. He was so fierce an advocate for some important causes he undertook, that his sincerity has been liable to suspicion; the pleader, in some points, certainly acting the part of a sophist. Were we to decide by the early appearances of his conduct, by the rapid change of his profession, by his obsequious servility to his country squire, and by what have been termed the hazardous “fooleries in criticism, and outrages in controversy,” which he systematically pursued, he looks like one not in earnest; and more zealous to maintain the character of his own genius, than the cause he had espoused. Leland once exclaimed, “What are we to think of the writer and his intentions? Is he really sincere in his reasonings?” Certain it is, his paradoxes often alarmed his friends, to repeat the words of a great critic, by “the absurdity of his criticism, the heterodoxy of his tenets, and the brutality of his invectives.” Our Juvenal, who, whatever might be the vehemence of his declamation, reflected always those opinions which floated about him, has drawn a full-length figure. He accounts for Warburton’s early motive in taking the cassock, as being

I would not insinuate that Warburton is to be ranked among the class he so loudly denounced, that of “Free-thinkers;” his mind, warm with imagination, seemed often tinged with credulity. But from his want of sober-mindedness, we cannot always prove his earnestness in the cause he advocated. He often sports with his fancies; he breaks out into the most familiar levity; and maintains, too broadly, subtile and refined principles, which evince more of the political than the primitive Christian. It is certain his infidelity was greatly suspected; and Hurd, to pass over the stigma of Warburton’s sudden conversion to the Church, insinuates that “an early seriousness of mind determined him to the ecclesiastical profession.”—“It may be so,” says the critic in the “Quarterly Review,” no languid admirer of this great man; “but the symptoms of that seriousness were very equivocal afterwards; and the certainty of an early provision, from a generous patron in the country, may perhaps be considered by those who are disposed to assign human conduct to ordinary motives, as quite adequate to the effect.”

Dr. Parr is indignant at such surmises; but the feeling is more honourable than the decision! In an admirable character of Warburton in the “Westminster Magazine” for 1779, it is acknowledged, “at his outset in life he was suspected of being inclined to infidelity; and it was not till many years had elapsed, that the orthodoxy of his opinions was generally assented to.” On this Dr. Parr observes, “Why Dr. Warburton was ever suspected of secret infidelity I know not. What he was inclined to think on subjects of religion, before, perhaps, he had leisure or ability to examine them, depends only upon obscure surmise, or vague report.” The words inclined to think seems a periphrase for secret infidelity. Our critic attributes these reports to “an English dunce, whose blunders and calumnies are now happily forgotten, and repeated by a French buffoon, whose morality is not commensurate with his wit.”—Tracts by Warburton, &c., p. 186.

“The English Dunce” I do not recollect; of this sort there are so many! Voltaire is “the French buffoon;” who, indeed, compares Warburton in his bishopric, to Peachum in the Beggar’s Opera—who, as Keeper of Newgate, was for hanging all his old accomplices!

Warburton was far more extravagant in a later attempt which he made to expound the odd visions of a crack-brained Welshman, a prophesying knave; a knave by his own confession, and a prophet by Warburton’s. This commentary, inserted in Jortin’s “Remarks on Ecclesiastical History,” considerably injured the reputation of Jortin. The story of Warburton and his Welsh Prophet would of itself be sufficient to detect the shiftings and artifices of his genius. Rice or Arise Evans! was one of the many prophets who rose up in Oliver’s fanatical days; and Warburton had the hardihood to insert, in Jortin’s learned work, a strange commentary to prove that Arise Evans, in Cromwell’s time, in his “Echo from Heaven,” had manifestly prophesied the Hanoverian Succession! The Welshman was a knave by his own account in subscribing with his right hand the confession he calls his prophecy, before a justice, and with his left, that which was his recantation, signed before the recorder, adding, “I know the bench and the people thought I recanted; but, alas! they were deceived;” and this Warburton calls “an uncommon fetch of wit,” to save the truth of the prophecy, though not the honour of the prophet. If Evans meant anything, he meant what was then floating in all men’s minds, the probable restoration of the Stuarts. By this prelude of that inventive genius which afterwards commented, in the same spirit, on the Æneid of Virgil, and the “Divine Legation, itself,” and made the same sort of discoveries, he fixed himself in this dilemma: either Warburton was a greater impostor than Arise Evans, or he was more credulous than even any follower of the Welsh prophet, if he really had any. But the truth is, that Warburton was always writing for a present purpose, and believed, and did not believe, as it happened. “Ordinary men believe one side of a contradiction at a time, whereas his lordship” (says his admirable antagonist) “frequently believes, or at least defends both. So that it would have been no great wonder if he should maintain that Evans was both a real prophet and an impostor.” Yet this is not the only awkward attitude into which Warburton has here thrown himself. To strain the vision of the raving Welshman to events of which he could have no notion, Warburton has plunged into the most ludicrous difficulties, all which ended, as all his discoveries have done, in making the fortune of an adversary who, like the Momus of Homer, has raised through the skies “inextinguishable laughter,” in the amusing tract of “Confusion worse Confounded, Rout on Rout, or the Bishop of G——’s Commentary on Arise Evans; by Indignatio,” 1772. The writer was the learned Henry Taylor, the author of Ben Mordecai’s Apology.

The correct taste of Lowth with some humour describes the last sentence of the “Enquiry on Prodigies” as “the Musa Pedestris got on horseback in a high prancing style.” He printed it in measured lines, without, however, changing the place of a single word, and it produced blank verse. Thus it reads—

Such a glowing metaphor, in the uncouth prose of Warburton, startled Lowth’s classical ear. It was indeed “the Musa Pedestris who had got on horseback in a high prancing style;” for as it has since been pointed out, it is a well-known passage towards the close of the Areopagitica of Milton, whose prose is so often purely poetical. See Birch’s Edition of Milton’s Prose Works, I. 158. Warburton was familiarly conversant with our great vernacular writers at a time when their names generally were better known than their works, and when it was considered safe to pillage their most glorious passages. Warburton has been convicted of snatching their purple patches, and sewing them into his coarser web, without any acknowledgment; he did this in the present remarkable instance, and at a later day, in the preface to his “Julian,” he laid violent hands on one of Raleigh’s splendid metaphors.

When Warburton was considered as a Colossus of literature, Ralph, the political writer, pointed a severe allusion to the awkward figure he makes in these Dedications. “The Colossus himself creeps between the legs of the late Sir Robert Sutton; in what posture, or for what purpose, need not be explained.”

Churchill has not passed by unnoticed Warburton’s humility, even to weakness, combined with pride which could rise to haughtiness.

Yet this man

It is certain that the proud and supercilious Warburton long crouched and fawned. Mallet, at least, well knew all that passed between Warburton and Pope. In the “Familiar Epistle” he asserts that Warburton was introduced to Pope by his “nauseous flattery.” A remarkable instance, besides the dedications we have noticed, occurred in his correspondence with Sir Thomas Hanmer. He did not venture to attack “The Oxford Editor,” as he sarcastically distinguishes him, without first demanding back his letters, which were immediately returned, from Sir Thomas’s high sense of honour. Warburton might otherwise have been shown strangely to contradict himself, for in these letters he had been most lavish of his flatteries and encomiums on the man whom he covered with ridicule in the preface to his Shakspeare. See “An Answer to certain Passages in Mr. W.’s Preface to Shakspeare,” 1748.

His dedication to the plain unlettered Ralph Allen of Bath, his greatest of patrons, of his “Commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man,” is written in the same spirit as those to Sir Robert Sutton; but the former unlucky gentleman was more publicly exposed by it. The subject of this dedication turns on “the growth and progress of Fate, divided into four principal branches!” There is an episode about Free-will and Nature and Grace, and “a contrivance of Leibnitz about Fatalism.” Ralph Allen was a good Quaker-like man, but he must have lost his temper if he ever read the dedication! Let us not, however, imagine that Warburton was at all insensible to this violation of literary decorum; he only sacrificed propriety to what he considered a more urgent principle—his own personal interest. No one had a juster conception of the true nature of dedications; for he says in the famous one “to the Free-thinkers:”—“I could never approve the custom of dedicating books to men whose professions made them strangers to the subject. A Discourse on the Ten Predicaments to a Leader of Armies, or a System of Casuistry to a Minister of State, always appeared to me a high absurdity.”

All human characters are mixed—true! yet still we feel indignant to discover some of the greatest often combining the most opposite qualities; and then they are not so much mixed as the parts are naturally joined together. Could one imagine that so lofty a character as Warburton could have been liable to have incurred even the random stroke of the satirist? whether true or false, the events of his life, better known at this day than in his own, will show. Churchill says that

The author of the “Canons of Criticism,” with all his sprightly sarcasm, gives a history of Warburton’s later Dedications. “The first edition of ‘The Alliance’ came out without a dedication, but was presented to the bishops; and when nothing came of that, the second was addressed to both the Universities; and when nothing came of that, the third was dedicated to a noble Earl, and nothing has yet come of that.” Appendix to “Canons of Criticism,” seventh edit. 261.

The palace here alluded to is fully described in a volume of “Travels through Sicily and Malta,” by P. Brydone, F.R.S., in 1770. He describes it as belonging to “the Prince of Palermo, a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry.” He tells us this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, “not one made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of every other animal to the bodies of men. Sometimes he makes a compound of five or six animals that have no sort of resemblance in nature. He puts the head of a lion on the neck of a goose, the body of a lizard, the legs of a goat, the tail of a fox; on the back of this monster he puts another, if possible still more hideous, with five or six heads, and a bush of horns. There is no kind of horn in the world he has not collected, and his pleasure is to see them all flourishing upon the same head.” The interior of the house was decorated in the same monstrous style, and the description, unique of its kind, occupies several pages of Mr. Brydone’s book.—Ed.

This letter was written in 1726, and first found by Dr. Knight in 1750, in fitting up a house where Concanen had probably lodged. It was suppressed, till Akenside, in 1766, printed it in a sixpenny pamphlet, entitled “An Ode to Mr. Edwards.” He preserved the curiosity, with “all its peculiarities of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.” The insulted poet took a deep revenge for the contemptuous treatment he had received from the modern Stagirite. The “peculiarities” betray most evident marks of the self-taught lawyer; the orthography and the double letters were minted in the office. [Thus he speaks of Addison as this “exact Mr. of propriety,” and of his own studies of the English poets “to trace them to their sources; and observe what oar, as well as what slime and gravel they brought down with them.”] When I looked for the letter in Akenside’s Works, I discovered that it had been silently dropped. Some interest, doubtless, had been made to suppress it, for Warburton was humbled when reminded of it. Malone, fortunately, has preserved it in his Shakspeare, where it may be found, in a place not likely to be looked into for it, at the close of Julius CÆsar: this literary curiosity had otherwise been lost for posterity; its whole history is a series of wonderful escapes.

By this document we became acquainted with the astonishing fact, that Warburton, early in life, was himself one of those very dunces whom he has so unmercifully registered in their Doomsday-book; one who admired the genius of his brothers, and spoke of Pope with the utmost contempt! [Thus he says, “Dryden, I observe, borrows for want of leisure, and Pope for want of genius!”]

Lee introduces Alexander the Great, saying,

In the province of taste Warburton was always at sea without chart or compass, and was as unlucky in his panegyric on Milton as on Lee. He calls the “Paradise Regained” “a charming poem, nothing inferior in the poetry and the sentiments to the Paradise Lost.” Such extravagance could only have proceeded from a critic too little sensible to the essential requisites of poetry itself.

Such opposite studies shot themselves into the most fantastical forms in his rocket-writings, whether they streamed in “The Divine Legation,” or sparkled in “The Origin of Romances,” or played about in giving double senses to Virgil, Pope, and Shakspeare. Churchill, with a good deal of ill-nature and some truth, describes them:—

The opinion of Bentley, when he saw “The Divine Legation,” was a sensible one. “This man,” said he, “has a monstrous appetite, with a very bad digestion.”

The Warburtonians seemed to consider his great work, as the Bible by which all literary men were to be sworn. Lowth ridicules their credulity. “‘The Divine Legation,’ it seems, contains in it all knowledge, divine and human, ancient and modern: it is a perfect EncyclopÆdia, including all history, criticism, divinity, law, politics, from the law of Moses down to the Jew bill, and from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern Rebus-writing, &c.”

“In the 2014 pages of the unfinished ‘Divine Legation,’” observes the sarcastic Gibbon, “four hundred authors are quoted, from St. Austin down to Scarron and Rabelais!”

Yet, after all that satire and wit have denounced, listen to an enlightened votary of Warburton. He asserts that “The ‘Divine Legation’ has taken its place at the head, not to say of English theology, but almost of English literature. To the composition of this prodigious performance, Hooker and Stillingfleet could have contributed the erudition, Chillingworth and Locke the acuteness, Taylor an imagination even more wild and copious, Swift, and perhaps, Eachard, the sarcastic vein of wit; but what power of understanding, except Warburton’s, could first have amassed all these materials, and then compacted them into a bulky and elaborate work, so consistent and harmonious.”—Quarterly Review. vol. vii.

“The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated,” vol. i. sec. iv. Observe the remarkable expression, “that last foible of superior genius.” He had evidently running in his mind Milton’s line on Fame—

In such an exalted state was Warburton’s mind when he was writing this, his own character.

The author of “The Canons of Criticism” addressed a severe sonnet to Warburton; and alludes to the “Alliance”:—

On which he adds this note, humorously stating the grand position of the work:—“The whole argument by which the alliance between Church and State is established, Mr. Warburton founds upon this supposition—‘That people, considering themselves in a religious capacity, may contract with themselves, considered in a civil capacity.’ The conceit is ingenious, but is not his own. Scrub, in the Beaux Stratagem, had found it out long ago: he considers himself as acting the different parts of all the servants in the family; and so Scrub, the coachman, ploughman, or justice’s clerk, might contract with Scrub, the butler, for such a quantity of ale as the other assumed character demanded.”—Appendix, p. 261.

“Monthly Review,” vol. xvi. p. 324, the organ of the dissenters.

See article Hobbes, for his system. The great Selden was an Erastian; a distinction extremely obscure. Erastus was a Swiss physician of little note, who was for restraining the ecclesiastical power from all temporal jurisdiction. Selden did him the honour of adopting his principles. Selden wrote against the divine right of tithes, but allowed the legal right, which gave at first great offence to the clergy, who afterwards perceived the propriety of his argument, as Wotton has fully acknowledged.

It does not always enter into the design of these volumes to examine those great works which produced literary quarrels. But some may be glad to find here a word on this original project.

The grand position of the Divine Legation is, that the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, or a future state of reward and punishment, is absolutely necessary in the moral government of the universe. The author shows how it has been inculcated by all good legislators, so that no religion could ever exist without it; but the Jewish could, from its peculiar government, which was theocracy—a government where the presence of God himself was perpetually manifested by miracles and new ordinances: and hence temporal rewards and punishments were sufficient for that people, to whom the unity and power of the Godhead were never doubtful. As he proceeded, he would have opened a new argument, viz., that the Jewish religion was only the part of a revelation, showing the necessity of a further one for its completion, which produced Christianity.

When Warburton was in good spirits with his great work (for he was not always so), he wrote thus to a friend:—“You judge right, that the next volume of the D.L. will not be the last. I thought I had told you that I had divided the work into three parts: the first gives you a view of Paganism; the second, of Judaism; and the third, of Christianity. You will wonder how this last inquiry can come into so simple an argument as that which I undertake to enforce. I have not room to tell you more than this—that after I have proved a future state not to be, in fact in the Mosaic dispensation, I next show that, if Christianity be true, it could not possibly be there; and this necessitates me to explain the nature of Christianity, with which the whole ends. But this inter nos. If it be known, I should possibly have somebody writing against this part too before it appears.”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 551.

Thus he exults in the true tone, and with all the levity of a sophist. It is well that a true feeling of religion does not depend on the quirks and quibbles of human reasonings, or, what are as fallible, on masses of fanciful erudition.

Warburton lost himself in the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed. This work harassed his days and exhausted his intellect. Observe the tortures of a mind, even of so great a mind as that of Warburton’s, when it sacrifices all to the perishable vanity of sudden celebrity. Often he flew from his task in utter exhaustion and despair. He had quitted the smooth and even line of truth, to wind about and split himself on all the crookedness of paradoxes. He paints his feelings in a letter to Birch. He says—“I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month and year to year.” He had recourse to “an expedient;” which was, “to set the press on work, and so oblige himself to supply copy.” Such is the confession of the author of the “Divine Legation!” this “encyclopÆdia” of all ancient and modern lore—all to proceed from “a simple argument!” But when he describes his sufferings, hard is the heart of that literary man who cannot sympathise with such a giant caught in the toils! I give his words:—“Distractions of various kinds, inseparable from human life, joined with a naturally melancholy habit, contribute greatly to increase my indolence. This makes my reading wild and desultory; and I seek refuge from the uneasiness of thought, from any book, let it be what it will. By my manner of writing upon subjects, you would naturally imagine they afford me pleasure, and attach me thoroughly. I will assure you, No!”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 562.

Warburton had not the cares of a family—they were merely literary ones. The secret cause of his “melancholy,” and his “indolence,” and that “want of attachment and pleasure to his subjects;” which his friends “naturally imagined” afforded him so much, was the controversies he had kindled, and the polemical battles he had raised about him. However boldly he attacked in return, his heart often sickened in privacy; for how often must he have beheld his noble and his whimsical edifices built on sands, which the waters were perpetually eating into!

At the last interview of Warburton with Pope, the dying poet exhorted him to proceed with “The Divine Legation.” “Your reputation,” said he, “as well as your duty, is concerned in it. People say you can get no farther in your proof. Nay, Lord Bolingbroke himself bids me expect no such thing.” This anecdote is rather extraordinary; for it appears in “Owen Ruffhead’s Life of Pope,” p. 497, a work written under the eye of Warburton himself; and in which I think I could point out some strong touches from his own hand on certain important occasions, when he would not trust to the creeping dulness of Ruffhead.

His temerity had raised against him not only infidels, but Christians. If any pious clergyman now wrote in favour of the opinion that God’s people believed in the immortality of the soul—which can we doubt they did? and which Menasseh Ben Israel has written his treatise, “De Resurrectione Mortuorum,” to prove—it was a strange sight to behold a bishop seeming to deny so rational and religious a creed! Even Dr. Balguy confessed to Warburton, that “there was one thing in the argument of the ‘Divine Legation’ that stuck more with candid men than all the rest—how a religion without a future state could be worthy of God!” This Warburton promised to satisfy, by a fresh appendix. His volatile genius, however, was condemned to “the pelting of a merciless storm.” Lowth told him—“You give yourself out as demonstrator of the divine legation of Moses; it has been often demonstrated before; a young student in theology might undertake to give a better—that is, a more satisfactory and irrefragable demonstration of it in five pages than you have done in five volumes.”—Lowth’s “Letter to Warburton,” p. 12.

Hurd was the son of a Staffordshire farmer, and was placed by him at Rugely, from whence he was removed to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-six he published a pamphlet entitled “Remarks on a late Book entitled ‘An Inquiry into the Rejection of the Christian Miracles by the Heathens, by William Weston,’” which met with considerable attention. In 1749, on the occasion of publishing a commentary on Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” he complimented Warburton so strongly as to ensure his favour. Warburton returned it by a puff for Hurd in his edition of Pope, and the two became fast friends. It was a profitable connexion to Hurd, for by the intercession of Warburton he was appointed one of the Whitehall preachers, a preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, and Archdeacon of Gloucester. He repaid Warburton by constant praises in print, and so far succeeded with that vain man, that when he read the dedication he made to him of his “Commentary on the Epistle to Augustus,” he wrote to him with mock humility—“I will confess to you how much satisfaction the groundless part of it, that which relates to myself, gave me.” When Dr. Jortin very properly spoke of Warburton with less of subserviency than the overbearing bishop desired, Hurd at once came forward to fight for Warburton in print, in a satirical treatise on “The Delicacy of Friendship,” which highly delighted his patron, who at once wrote to Dr. Lowth, stating him to be “a man of very superior talents, of genius, learning, and virtue; indeed, a principal ornament of the age he lives in.” Hurd was made Bishop of Lichfield in 1775, and of Winchester in 1779. He died in the year 1808.—Ed.

The Attic irony was translated into plain English, in “Remarks on Dr. Warburton’s Account of the Sentiments of the Early Jews,” 1757; and the following rules for all who dissented from Warburton are deduced:—“You must not write on the same subject that he does. You must not glance at his arguments, even without naming him or so much as referring to him. If you find his reasonings ever so faulty, you must not presume to furnish him with better of your own, even though you prove, and are desirous to support his conclusions. When you design him a compliment, you must express it in full form, and with all the circumstance of panegyrical approbation, without impertinently qualifying your civilities by assigning a reason why you think he deserves them, as this might possibly be taken for a hint that you know something of the matter he is writing about as well as himself. You must never call any of his discoveries by the name of conjectures, though you allow them their full proportion of elegance, learning, &c.; for you ought to know that this capital genius never proposed anything to the judgment of the public (though ever so new and uncommon) with diffidence in his life. Thus stands the decree prescribing our demeanour towards this sovereign in the Republic of Letters, as we find it promulged, and bearing date at the palace of Lincoln’s Inn, Nov. 25, 1755.”—From whence Hurd’s “Seventh Dissertation” was dated.

Gibbon’s “Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of the Æneid.” Dr. Parr considers this clear, elegant, and decisive work of criticism, as a complete refutation of Warburton’s discovery.

It is curious enough to observe that Warburton himself, acknowledging this to be a paradox, exultingly exclaims, “Which, like so many others I have had the ODD FORTUNE to advance, will be seen to be only another name for Truth.” This has all the levity of a sophist’s language! Hence we must infer that some of the most important subjects could not be understood and defended, but by Warburton’s “odd fortune!” It was this levity of ideas that raised a suspicion that he was not always sincere. He writes, in a letter, of “living in mere spite, to rub another volume of the ‘Divine Legation’ in the noses of bigots and zealots.” He employs the most ludicrous images, and the coarsest phrases, on the most solemn subjects. In one of his most unlucky paradoxes with Lowth, on the age and style of the writings of Job, he accuses that elegant scholar of deficient discernment; and, in respect to style, as not “distinguishing partridge from horseflesh;” and in quoting some of the poetical passages, of “paying with an old song,” and “giving rhyme for reason.” Alluding to some one of his adversaries, whom he calls “the weakest, as well as the wickedest of all mankind,” he employs a striking image—“I shall hang him and his fellows, as they do vermin in a warren, and leave them to posterity, to stink and blacken in the wind.”

Warburton, in this work (the “Doctrine of Grace,”) has a curious passage, too long to quote, where he observes, that “The Indian and Asiatic eloquence was esteemed hyperbolic and puerile by the more phlegmatic inhabitants of Rome and Athens: and the Western eloquence, in its turn, frigid or insipid, to the hardy and inflamed imaginations of the East. The same expression, which in one place had the utmost simplicity, had in another the utmost sublime.” The jackal, too, echoes the roar of the lion; for the polished Hurd, whose taste was far more decided than Warburton’s, was bold enough to add, in his Letter to Leland, “That which is thought supremely elegant in one country, passes in another for finical; while what in this country is accepted under the idea of sublimity, is derided in that other as no better than bombast.” So unsettled were the no-taste of Warburton, and the prim-taste of Hurd!

Dr. Thomas Leland was born in Dublin in 1722, and was educated in Trinity College, in that city. Having obtained a Fellowship there, he depended on that alone, and devoted a long life to study, and the production of various historical and theological works; as well as a “History of Ireland,” published in 1773. He died in 1785.—Ed.

In a rough attack on Warburton, respecting Pope’s privately printing 1500 copies of the “Patriot King” of Bolingbroke, which I conceive to have been written by Mallet, I find a particular account of the manner in which the “Essay on Man” was written, over which Johnson seems to throw great doubts.

The writer of this angry epistle, in addressing Warburton, says: “If you were as intimate with Mr. Pope as you pretend, you must know the truth of a fact which several others, as well as I, who never had the honour of a personal acquaintance with Lord Bolingbroke or Mr. Pope, have heard. The fact was related to me by a certain Senior Fellow of one of our Universities, who was very intimate with Mr. Pope. He started some objections, one day, at Mr. Pope’s house, to the doctrine contained in the Ethic Epistles: upon which Mr. Pope told him that he would soon convince him of the truth of it, by laying the argument at large before him; for which purpose he gave him a large prose manuscript to peruse, telling him, at the same time, the author’s name. From this perusal, whatever other conviction the doctor might receive, he collected at least this: that Mr. Pope had from his friend not only the doctrine, but even the finest and strongest ornaments of his Ethics. Now, if this fact be true (as I question not but you know it to be so), I believe no man of candour will attribute such merit to Mr. Pope as you would insinuate, for acknowledging the wisdom and the friendship of the man who was his instructor in philosophy; nor consequently that this acknowledgment, and the dedication of his own system, put into a poetical dress by Mr. Pope, laid his lordship under the necessity of never resenting any injury done to him by the poet afterwards. Mr. Pope told no more than literal truth, in calling Lord Bolingbroke his guide, philosopher, and friend.” The existence of this very manuscript volume was authenticated by Lord Bathurst, in a conversation with Dr. Blair and others, where he said, “he had read the MS. in Lord Bolingbroke’s handwriting, and was at a loss whether most to admire the elegance of Lord Bolingbroke’s prose, or the beauty of Mr. Pope’s verse.”—See the letter of Dr. Blair in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson.”

Of many instances, the following one is the most curious. When Jarvis published his “Don Quixote,” Warburton, who was prompt on whatever subject was started, presented him with “A Dissertation on the Origin of the Books of Chivalry.” When it appeared, it threw Pope, their common friend, into raptures. He writes, “I knew you as certainly as the ancients did the gods, by the first pace and the very gait.” True enough! Warburton’s strong genius stamped itself on all his works. But neither the translating painter, nor the simple poet, could imagine the heap of absurdities they were admiring! Whatever Warburton here asserted was false, and whatever he conjectured was erroneous; but his blunders were quite original.—The good sense and knowledge of Tyrwhitt have demolished the whole edifice, without leaving a single brick standing. The absurd rhapsody has been worth preserving, for the sake of the masterly confutation: no uncommon result of Warburton’s literary labours!

It forms the concluding note in Shakspeare’s Love’s Labour Lost.

Of Theobald he was once the companion, and to Sir Thomas Hanmer he offered his notes for his edition. [Hanmer’s Shakspeare was given in 1742 to the University of Oxford, for its benefit, and was printed at the University Press, under the management of Dr. Smith and Dr. Shippon. Sir Thomas paid the expenses of the engravings by Gravelot prefixed to each play. The edition was published in 4to. in 1744, it was printed on the “finest royal paper,” and does not warrant the severity of Pope, whose editing was equally faulty.] Sir Thomas says he found Warburton’s notes “sometimes just, but mostly wild and out of the way.” Warburton paid a visit to Sir Thomas for a week, which he conceived was to assist him in perfecting his darling text; but hints were now dropped by Warburton, that he might publish the work corrected, by which a greater sum of money might be got than could be by that plaything of Sir Thomas, which shines in all its splendour in the Dunciad; but this project did not suit Hanmer, whose life seemed greatly to depend on the magnificent Oxford edition, which “was not to go into the hands of booksellers.” On this, Warburton, we are told by Hanmer, “flew into a great rage, and there is an end of the story.” With what haughtiness he treats these two friends, for once they were such! Had the Dey of Algiers been the editor of Shakspeare, he could not have issued his orders more peremptorily for the decapitation of his rivals. Of Theobald and Hanmer he says, “the one was recommended to me as a poor man, the other as a poor critic: and to each of them at different times I communicated a great number of observations, which they managed, as they saw fit, to the relief of their several distresses. Mr. Theobald was naturally turned to industry and labour. What he read he could transcribe; but as to what he thought, if ever he did think, he could but ill express, so he read on: and by that means got a character of learning, without risking to every observer the imputation of wanting a better talent.”—See what it is to enjoy too close an intimacy with a man of wit! “As for the Oxford Editor, he wanted nothing (alluding to Theobald’s want of money) but what he might very well be without, the reputation of a critic,” &c. &c.—Warburton’s Preface to Shakspeare.

His conduct to Dr. Grey, the editor of Hudibras, cannot be accounted for by any known fact. I have already noticed their quarrels in the “Calamities of Authors.” Warburton cheerfully supplied Grey with various notes on Hudibras, though he said he had thought of an edition himself, and they were gratefully acknowledged in Grey’s Preface; but behold! shortly afterwards they are saluted by Warburton as “an execrable heap of nonsense;” further, he insulted Dr. Grey for the number of his publications! Poor Dr. Grey and his “Coadjutors,” as Warburton sneeringly called others of his friends, resented this by “A Free and Familiar Letter to that Great Preserver of Pope and Shakspeare, the Rev. Mr. William Warburton.” The doctor insisted that Warburton had had sufficient share in those very notes to be considered as one of the “Coadjutors.” “I may venture to say, that whoever was the fool of the company before he entered (or the fool of the piece, in his own diction) he was certainly so after he engaged in that work; for, as Ben Jonson observes, ‘he that thinks himself the Master-Wit is commonly the Master-Fool.’”

Warburton certainly used little intrigues: he trafficked with the obscure Reviews of the times. He was a correspondent in “The Works of the Learned,” where the account of his first volume of the Divine Legation, he says, is “a nonsensical piece of stuff;” and when Dr. Doddridge offered to draw up an article for his second, the favour was accepted, and it was sent to the miserable journal, though acknowledged “to be too good for it.” In the same journal were published all his specimens of Shakspeare, some years after they had appeared in the “General Dictionary,” with a high character of these wonderful discoveries.—“The Alliance,” when first published, was announced in “The Present State of the Republic of Letters,” to be the work of a gentleman whose capacity, judgment, and learning deserve some eminent dignity in the Church of England, of which he is “now an inferior minister.”—One may presume to guess at “the gentleman,” a little impatient for promotion, who so much cared whether Warburton was only “now an inferior minister.”

These are little arts. Another was, that Warburton sometimes acted Falstaff’s part, and ran his sword through the dead! In more instances than one this occurred. Sir Thomas Hanmer was dead when Warburton, then a bishop, ventured to assert that Sir Thomas’s letter concerning their intercourse about Shakspeare was “one continued falsehood from beginning to end.” The honour and veracity of Hanmer must prevail over the “liveliness” of Warburton, for Hurd lauds his “lively preface to his Shakspeare.” But the “Biographia Britannica” bears marks of Warburton’s violence, in a cancelled sheet. See the Index, art. Hanmer; [where we are told “the sheet being castrated at the instance of Mr., now Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, it has been reprinted as an appendix to the work,” it consisted in the suppression of one of Hanmer’s letters.] He did not choose to attack Dr. Middleton in form, during his lifetime, but reserved his blow when his antagonist was no more. I find in Cole’s MSS. this curious passage:—“It was thought, at Cambridge, that Dr. Middleton and Dr. Warburton did not cordially esteem one another; yet both being keen and thorough sportsmen, they were mutually afraid to engage to each other, for fear of a fall. If that was the case, the bishop judged prudently, however fairly it may be looked upon, to stay till it was out of the power of his adversary to make any reply, before he gave his answer.” Warburton only replied to Middleton’s “Letter from Rome,” in his fourth edition of the “Divine Legation,” 1765.—When Dyson firmly defended his friend Akenside from the rude attacks of Warburton, it is observed, that he bore them with “prudent patience:” he never replied!

These critical extravaganzas are scarcely to be paralleled by “Bentley’s Notes on Milton.” How Warburton turned “an allegorical mermaid” into “the Queen of Scots;”—showed how Shakspeare, in one word, and with one epithet “the majestic world,” described the Orbis Romanus, alluded to the Olympic Games, &c.; yet, after all this discovery, seems rather to allude to a story about Alexander, which Warburton happened to recollect at that moment;—and how he illustrated Octavia’s idea of the fatal consequences of a civil war between CÆsar and Antony, who said it would “cleave the world,” by the story of Curtius leaping into the chasm;—how he rejected “allowed, with absolute power,” as not English, and read “hallowed,” on the authority of the Roman Tribuneship being called Sacro-sancta Potestas; how his emendations often rose from puns; as for instance, when, in Romeo and Juliet, it is said of the Friar, that “the city is much obliged to him,” our new critic consents to the sound of the word, but not to the spelling, and reads hymn; that is, to laud, to praise! These, and more extraordinary instances of perverting ingenuity and abused erudition, would form an uncommon specimen of criticism, which may be justly ridiculed, but which none, except an exuberant genius, could have produced. The most amusing work possible would be a real Warburton’s Shakspeare, which would contain not a single thought, and scarcely an expression, of Shakspeare’s!

Had Johnson known as much as we do of Warburton’s opinion of his critical powers, it would have gone far to have cured his amiable prejudice in favour of Warburton, who really was a critic without taste, and who considered literature as some do politics, merely as a party business. I shall give a remarkable instance. When Johnson published his first critical attempt on Macbeth, he commended the critical talents of Warburton; and Warburton returned the compliment in the preface to his Shakspeare, and distinguishes Johnson as “a man of parts and genius.” But, unluckily, Johnson afterwards published his own edition; and, in his editorial capacity, his public duty prevailed over his personal feelings: all this went against Warburton; and the opinions he now formed of Johnson were suddenly those of insolent contempt. In a letter to Hurd, he writes: “Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think alike!” And to another friend: “The remarks he makes, in every page, on my Commentaries, are full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in them as much folly as malignity, I should have reason to be offended with.” He consoles himself, however, that Johnson’s notes, accompanying his own, will enable even “the trifling part of the public” not to mistake in the comparison.—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 595.

And what became of Johnson’s noble Preface to Shakspeare? Not a word on that!—Warburton, who himself had written so many spirited ones, perhaps did not like to read one finer than his own,—so he passed it by! He travelled through Egypt, but held his hands before his eyes at a pyramid!

Thomas Edwards chiefly led the life of a literary student, though he studied for the Bar at Lincoln’s-Inn, and was fully admitted a member thereof. He died unmarried at the age of 58. He descended from a family of lawyers; possessed a sufficient private property to ensure independence, and died on his own estate of Turrick, in Buckinghamshire. Dr. Warton observes, “This attack on Mr. Edwards is not of weight sufficient to weaken the effects of his excellent ‘Canons of Criticism,’ all impartial critics allow these remarks to have been decisive and judicious, and his book remains unrefuted and unanswerable.”—Ed.

Some grave dull men, who did not relish the jests, doubtless the booksellers, who, to buy the name of Warburton, had paid down 500l. for the edition, loudly complained that Edwards had injured both him and them, by stopping the sale! On this Edwards expresses his surprise, how “a little twelvepenny pamphlet could stop the progress of eight large octavo volumes;” and apologises, by applying a humorous story to Warburton, for “puffing himself off in the world for what he is not, and now being discovered.”—“I am just in the case of a friend of mine, who, going to visit an acquaintance, upon entering his room, met a person going out of it:—‘Prythee, Jack,’ says he, ‘what do you do with that fellow?’ ‘Why, ’tis Don Pedro di Mondongo, my Spanish master.’—‘Spanish master!’ replies my friend; ‘why, he’s an errant Teague; I know the fellow well enough: ’tis Rory Gehagan. He may possibly have been in Spain; but, depend on’t, he will sell you the Tipperary brogue for pure Castilian.’ Now honest Rory has just the same reason of complaint against this gentleman as Mr. Warburton has against me, and I suppose abused him as heartily for it; but nevertheless the gentleman did both parties justice.”

Some secret history is attached to this publication, so fatal to Warburton’s critical character in English literature. This satire, like too many which have sprung out of literary quarrels, arose from personal motives! When Edwards, in early life, after quitting college, entered the army, he was on a visit at Mr. Allen’s, at Bath, whose niece Warburton afterwards married. Literary subjects formed the usual conversation. Warburton, not suspecting the red coat of covering any Greek, showed his accustomed dogmatical superiority. Once, when the controversy was running high, Edwards taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a manner quite contrary to Warburton. He did unluckily something more—he showed that Warburton’s mistake had arisen from having used a French translation!—and all this before Ralph Allen and his niece! The doughty critic was at once silenced, in sullen indignation and mortal hatred. To this circumstance is attributed Edwards’s “Canons of Criticism,” which were followed up by Warburton with incessant attacks; in every new edition of Pope, in the “Essay on Criticism,” and the Dunciad. Warburton asserts that Edwards is a very dull writer (witness the pleasantry that carries one through a volume of no small size), that he is a libeller (because he ruined the critical character of Warburton)—and “a libeller (says Warburton, with poignancy), is nothing but a Grub-street critic run to seed.”—He compares Edwards’s wit and learning to his ancestor Tom Thimble’s, in the Rehearsal (because Edwards read Greek authors in their original), and his air of good-nature and politeness, to Caliban’s in the Tempest (because he had so keenly written the “Canons of Criticism”).—I once saw a great literary curiosity: some proof-sheets of the Dunciad of Warburton’s edition. I observed that some of the bitterest notes were after-thoughts, written on those proof-sheets after he had prepared the book for the press—one of these additions was his note on Edwards. Thus Pope’s book afforded renewed opportunities for all the personal hostilities of this singular genius!

In the “Richardsoniana,” p. 264, the younger Richardson, who was admitted to the intimacy of Pope, and collated the press for him, gives some curious information about Warburton’s Commentary, both upon the “Essay on Man” and the “Essay on Criticism.” “Warburton’s discovery of the ‘regularity’ of Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism,’ and ‘the whole scheme’ of his ‘Essay on Man,’ I happen to know to be mere absurd refinement in creating conformities; and this from Pope himself, though he thought fit to adopt them afterwards.” The genius of Warburton might not have found an invincible difficulty in proving that the “Essay on Criticism” was in fact an Essay on Man, and the reverse. Pope, before he knew Warburton, always spoke of his “Essay on Criticism” as “an irregular collection of thoughts thrown together as Horace’s ‘Art of Poetry’ was.” “As for the ‘Essay on Man,’” says Richardson, “I know that he never dreamed of the scheme he afterwards adopted; but he had taken terror about the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism and deistical tendency, of which my father and I talked with him frequently at Twickenham, without his appearing to understand it, or ever thinking to alter those passages which we suggested.”—This extract is to be valued, for the information is authentic; and it assists us in throwing some light on the subtilty of Warburton’s critical impositions.

The postscript to Warburton’s “Dedication to the Freethinkers,” is entirely devoted to Akenside; with this bitter opening, “The Poet was too full of the subject and of himself.”

“An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, occasioned by his Treatment of the Author of ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination,’” 1744. While Dyson repels Warburton’s accusations against “the Poet,” he retorts some against the critic himself. Warburton often perplexed a controversy by a subtile change of a word; or by breaking up a sentence; or by contriving some absurdity in the shape of an inference, to get rid of it in a mock triumph. These little weapons against the laws of war are insidiously practised in the war of words. Warburton never replied.

The paradoxical title of his great work was evidently designed to attract the unwary. “The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated—from the omission of a future state!” It was long uncertain whether it was “a covert attack on Christianity, instead of a defence of it.” I have here no concern with Warburton’s character as a polemical theologist; this has been the business of that polished and elegant scholar, Bishop Lowth, who has shown what it is to be in Hebrew literature “a Quack in Commentatorship, and a Mountebank in Criticism.” He has fully entered into all the absurdity of Warburton’s “ill-starred Dissertation on Job.” It is curious to observe that Warburton in the wild chase of originality, often too boldly took the bull by the horns, for he often adopted the very reasonings and objections of infidels!—for instance, in arguing on the truth of the Hebrew text, because the words had no points when a living language, he absolutely prefers the Koran for correctness! On this Lowth observes: “You have been urging the same argument that Spinoza employed, in order to destroy the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, and to introduce infidelity and atheism.” Lowth shows further, that “this was also done by ‘a society of gentlemen,’ in their ‘Sacerdotism Displayed,’ said to be written by ‘a select committee of the Deists and Freethinkers of Great Britain,’ whose author Warburton himself had represented to be ‘the forwardest devil of the whole legion.’” Lowth, however, concludes that all the mischief has arisen only from “your lordship’s undertaking to treat of a subject with which you appear to be very much unacquainted.”—Lowth’s Letter, p. 91.

Lowth remonstrated with Warburton on his “supreme authority:”—“I did not care to protest against the authoritative manner in which you proceeded, or to question your investiture in the high office of Inquisitor General and Supreme Judge of the Opinions of the Learned, which you had long before assumed, and had exercised with a ferocity and a despotism without example in the Republic of Letters, and hardly to be paralleled among the disciples of Dominic; exacting their opinions to the standard of your infallibility, and prosecuting with implacable hatred every one that presumed to differ from you.”—Lowth’s Letter to W., p. 9.

Warburton had the most cutting way of designating his adversaries, either by the most vehement abuse or the light petulance that expressed his ineffable contempt. He says to one, “Though your teeth are short, what you want in teeth you have in venom, and know, as all other creatures do, where your strength lies.” He thus announces in one of the prefaces to the “Divine Legation” the name of the author of a work on “A Future State of Rewards and Punishments,” in which were some objections to Warburton’s theory:—“I shall, therefore, but do what indeed would be justly reckoned the cruellest of all things, tell my reader the name of this miserable; which we find to be J. Tillard.” “Mr. Tillard was first condemned (says the author of ‘Confusion Worse Confounded,’) as a ruffian that stabs a man in the dark, because he did not put his name to his book against the ‘Divine Legation;’ and afterwards condemned as lost to shame, both as a man and a writer, because he did put his name to it.” Would not one imagine this person to be one of the lowest of miscreants? He was a man of fortune and literature. Of this person Warburton says in a letter, “This is a man of fortune, and it is well he is so, for I have spoiled his trade as a writer; and as he was very abusive, free-thinking, and anonymous, I have not spared to expose his ignorance and ill faith.” But afterwards, having discovered that he was a particular friend to Dr. Oliver, he makes awkward apologies, and declares he would not have gone so far had he known this! He was often so vehement in his abuse that I find he confessed it himself, for, in preparing a new edition of the “Divine Legation,” he tells Dr. Birch that he has made “several omissions of passages which were thought vain, insolent, and ill-natured.”

It is amusing enough to observe how he designates men as great as himself. When he mentions the learned Hyde, he places him “at the head of a rabble of lying orientalists.” When he alludes to Peters, a very learned and ingenious clergyman, he passes by him as “The Cornish Critic.” A friend of Peters observed that “he had given Warburton ‘a Cornish hug,’ of which he might be sore as long as he lived.” Dr. Taylor, the learned editor of Demosthenes, he selects from “his fellows,” that is, other dunces: a delicacy of expression which offended scholars. He threatens Dr. Stebbing, who had preserved an anonymous character, “to catch this Eel of Controversy, since he hides his head by the tail, the only part that sticks out of the mud, more dirty indeed than slippery, and still more weak than dirty, as passing through a trap where he was forced at every step to leave part of his skin—that is, his system.” Warburton has often true wit. With what provoking contempt he calls Sir Thomas Hanmer always “The Oxford Editor!” and in his attack on Akenside, never fails to nickname him, in derision, “The Poet!” I refer the reader to a postscript of his “Dedication to the Freethinkers,” for a curious specimen of supercilious causticity in his description of Lord Kaimes as a critic, and Akenside as “The Poet!” Of this pair he tells us, in bitter derision, “they are both men of taste.” Hurd imitated his master successfully, by using some qualifying epithet, or giving an adversary some odd nickname, or discreetly dispensing a little mortifying praise. The antagonists he encounters were men sometimes his superiors, and these he calls “sizeable men.” Some are styled “insect blasphemers!” The learned Lardner is reduced to “the laborious Dr. Lardner;” and “Hume’s History” is treated with the discreet praise of being “the most readable history we have.” He carefully hints to Leland that “he had never read his works, nor looked into his translations; but what he has heard of his writings makes him think favourably of him.” Thus he teases the rhetorical professor by mentioning the “elegant translation which, they say, you have made of Demosthenes!” And he understands that he is “a scholar, who, they say, employs himself in works of learning and taste.”

Lowth seems to have discovered this secret art of Warburton; for he says, “You have a set of names always at hand, a kind of infamous list, or black calendar, where every offender is sure to find a niche ready to receive him; nothing so easy as the application, and slight provocation is sufficient.”

Sometimes Warburton left his battles to be fought by subaltern genius; a circumstance to which Lowth, with keen pleasantry, thus alludes:—“Indeed, my lord, I was afterwards much surprised, when, having been with great civility dismissed from your presence, I found your footman at your door, armed with his master’s cane, and falling upon me without mercy, yourself looking on and approving, and having probably put the weapon with proper orders into his hands. You think, it seems, that I ought to have taken my beating quietly and patiently, in respect to the livery which he wore. I was not of so tame a disposition: I wrested the weapon from him, and broke it. Your lordship, it seems, by an oblique blow, got an unlucky rap on the knuckles; though you may thank yourself for it, you lay the blame on me.”—Lowth’s Letter to W., p. 11.

Warburton and Hurd frequently concerted together on the manner of attack and defence. In one of these letters of Hurd’s it is very amusing to read—“Taylor is a more creditable dunce than Webster. What do you think to do with the Appendix against Tillard and Sykes? Why might not Taylor rank with them,” &c. The Warburtonians had also a system of espionage. When Dr. Taylor was accused by one of them of having said that Warburton was no scholar, the learned Grecian replied that he did not recollect ever saying that Dr. Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always thought so. Hence a tremendous quarrel! Hurd, the Mercury of our Jupiter, cast the first light shaft against the doctor, then Chancellor of Lincoln, by alluding to the Preface of his work on Civil Law as “a certain thing prefatory to a learned work, intituled ‘The Elements of Civil Law:’” but at length Jove himself rolled his thunder on the hapless chancellor. The doctor had said in his work, that “the Roman emperors persecuted the first Christians, not so much from a dislike of their tenets as from a jealousy of their nocturnal assemblies.” Warburton’s doctrine was, that “they held nocturnal assemblies because of the persecution of their enemies.” One was the fact, and the other the consequence. But the Chancellor of Lincoln was to be outrageously degraded among the dunces! that was the real motive; the “nocturnal assemblies” only the ostensible one. A pamphleteer, in defence of the chancellor, in reply, thought that in “this literary persecution” it might be dangerous “if Dr. Taylor should be provoked to prove in print what he only dropped in conversation.” How innocent was this gentleman of the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars! The proof would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his sarcastic pleasantry; and this object was secured by Warburton’s forty pages of preface, in which the chancellor stands to be buffeted like an ancient quintain, “a mere lifeless block.” All this came upon him for only thinking that Warburton was no scholar!

See what I have said at the close of the note, pp. 262-3. In a collection entitled “Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton’s late Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works,” 1751, are numerous epigrams, parodies, and similes on it. I give one:—

Lowth has noticed the use Warburton made of his patent for vending Pope. “I thought you might possibly whip me at the cart’s-tail in a note to the ‘Divine Legation,’ the ordinary place of your literary executions; or pillory me in the Dunciad, another engine which, as legal proprietor, you have very ingeniously and judiciously applied to the same purpose; or, perhaps, have ordered me a kind of Bridewell correction, by one of your beadles, in a pamphlet.”—Lowth’s “Letter to Warburton,” p. 4.

Warburton carried the licentiousness of the pen in all these notes to the Dunciad to a height which can only be paralleled in the gross logomachies of Schioppius, Gronovius, and Scaliger, and the rest of that snarling crew. But his wit exceeded even his grossness. He was accused of not sparing—

And one of his most furious assailants thus salutes him:—“Whether you are a wrangling Wapping attorney, a pedantic pretender to criticism, an impudent paradoxical priest, or an animal yet stranger, an heterogeneous medley of all three, as your farraginous style seems to confess.”—An Epistle to the Author of a Libel entitled “A Letter to the Editor of Bolingbroke’s Works,” &c.—See Nichols, vol. v. p. 651.

I have ascertained that Mallet was the author of this furious epistle. He would not acknowledge what he dared not deny. Warburton treated Mallet, in this instance, as he often did his superiors—he never replied! The silence seems to have stung this irascible and evil spirit: he returned again to the charge, with another poisoned weapon. His rage produced “A Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living,” 1749. The style of this second letter has been characterised as “bad enough to disgrace even gaols and garrets.” Its virulence could not well exceed its predecessor. The oddness of its title has made this worthless thing often inquired after. It is merely personal. It is curious to observe Mallet, in this pamphlet, treat Pope as an object of pity, and call him “this poor man.” [David Mallet was the son of an innkeeper, who, by means of the party he wrote for, obtained lucrative appointments under Government, and died rich. He was unscrupulous in his career, and ready as a writer to do the most unworthy things. The death of Admiral Byng was hastened by the unscrupulous denunciations of Mallet, who was pensioned in consequence.] Orator Henley took some pains, on the first appearance of this catching title, to assure his friends that it did not refer to him. The title proved contagious; which shows the abuse of Warburton was very agreeable. Dr. Z. Grey, under the title of “A Country Curate,” published “A Free and Familiar Letter to the Great Refiner of Pope and Shakspeare,” 1750; and in 1753, young Cibber tried also at “A Familiar Epistle to Mr. William Warburton, from Mr. Theophilus Cibber,” prefixed to the “Life of Barton Booth.” Dr. Z. Grey’s “freedom and familiarity” are designed to show Warburton that he has no wit; but unluckily, the doctor having none himself, his arguments against Warburton’s are not decisive. “The familiarity” of Mallet is that of a scoundrel, and the younger Cibber’s that of an idiot: the genius of Warburton was secure. Mallet overcharged his gun with the fellest intentions, but found his piece, in bursting, annihilated himself. The popgun of the little Theophilus could never have been heard!

[Warburton never lost a chance of giving a strong opinion against Mallet; and Dr. Johnson says, “When Mallet undertook to write the ‘Life of Marlborough,’ Warburton remarked that he might perhaps forget that Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a philosopher.”]

But Warburton’s rage was only a part of his secret principle; for can anything be more witty than his attack on poor Cooper, the author of “The Life of Socrates?” Having called his book “a late worthless and now forgotten thing, called ‘The Life of Socrates,’” he adds, “where the head of the author has just made a shift to do the office of a camera obscura, and represent things in an inverted order, himself above, and Rollin, Voltaire, and every other author of reputation, below.” When Cooper complained of this, and of some severer language, to Warburton, through a friend, Warburton replied that Cooper had attacked him, and that he had only taken his revenge “with a slight joke.” Cooper was weak and vain enough to print a pamphlet, to prove that this was a serious accusation, and no joke; and if it was a joke, he shows it was not a correct one. In fact, Cooper could never comprehend how his head was like a camera obscura! Cooper was of the Shaftesburian school—philosophers who pride themselves on “the harmony” of their passions, but are too often in discords at a slight disturbance. He equalled the virulence of Warburton, but could not attain to the wit. “I found,” says Cooper, “previous to his pretended witticism about the camera obscura, such miserable spawn of wretched malice, as nothing but the inflamed brain of a rank monk could conceive, or the oyster-selling maids near London Bridge could utter.” One would not suppose all this came from the school of Plato, but rather from the tub of Diogenes. Something must be allowed for poor Cooper, whose “Life of Socrates” had been so positively asserted to be “a late worthless and forgotten thing.” It is curious enough to observe Cooper declaring, after this sally, that Warburton “has very unfortunately used the word impudent (which epithet Warburton had applied to him), as it naturally reminds every reader that the pamphlet published about two years ago, addressed ‘to the most impudent man living,’ was universally acknowledged to be dedicated to our commentator.” Warburton had always the Dunciad in his head when a new quarrel was rising, which produced an odd blunder on the side of Edwards, and provoked that wit to be as dull as Cooper. Warburton said, in one of his notes on Edwards, who had entitled himself “a gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn,”—“This gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, is in reality a gentleman only of the Dunciad, or, to speak him better, in the plain language of our honest ancestors to such mushrooms, a gentleman of the last edition.” Edwards misunderstood the allusion, and sore at the personal attack which followed, of his having “eluded the solicitude of his careful father,” considered himself “degraded of his gentility,” that it was “a reflection on his birth,” and threatened to apply to “Mr. Warburton’s Masters of the Bench, for degrading a ‘barrister of their house.’” This afforded a new triumph to Warburton, in a new note, where he explains his meaning of these “mushrooms,” whom he meant merely as literary ones; and assures “Fungoso and his friends, who are all gentlemen, that he meant no more than that Edwards had become a gentleman of the last edition of the Dunciad!” Edwards and his fungous friends had understood the phrase as applied to new-fangled gentry. One of these wits, in the collection of verses cited above, says to Warburton:—

Warburton had the full command over the Dunciad, even when Pope was alive, for it was in consequence of Warburton’s being refused a degree at Oxford, that the poet, though one had been offered to himself, produced the celebrated lines of “Apollo’s Mayor and Aldermen,” in the fourth Dunciad. Thus it is that the personal likes and dislikes of witty men come down to posterity, and are often mistaken as just satire, when, after all, they are nothing but Literary Quarrels, seldom founded on truth, and very often complete falsehoods!

Dr. Thomas Balguy was the son of a learned father, at whose rectory of Northallerton he was born; he was appointed Archdeacon of Salisbury in 1759, and afterwards Archdeacon of Winchester. He died at the prebendal house of the latter city in 1795, at the age of 74. His writings are few—chiefly on church government and authority, which brought him into antagonism with Dr. Priestley and others, who objected to the high view he took of its position. With Hurd and Warburton he was always intimate; his sermon on the consecration of the former was one of the sources of adverse attack; the latter notes his death as that of “an old and esteemed friend.”—Ed.

Dr. Brown was patronised and “pitied” by Warburton for years. He used him, but spoke of him disparagingly, as “a helpless creature in the ways of the world.” Nichols speaks of him as an “elegant, ingenious, and unhappy author.” His father was a native of Scotland; his son was born at Rothbury, in Northumberland, educated at Cambridge, made minor canon at Carlisle, but resigned it in disgust, living in obscurity in that city several years, till the Rebellion of 1745, when he acted as a volunteer at the siege of the Castle, and behaved with great intrepidity. His publication of an “Essay on Satire,” on the death of Pope, led to his acquaintance with Warburton, who helped him to the rectory of Horksley, near Colchester; but he quarrelled with his patron, as he afterwards quarrelled with others. He then settled down to the vicarage of St. Nicholas, Newcastle, but not for long, as an educational scheme of the Empress of Russia offered him inducements to leave England; but his health failed him before he could carry out his intentions, irritability succeeded, and his disappointments, real and imaginary, led him to commit suicide in the fifty-first year of his age. He seems to have been a continual trouble to Warburton, who often alludes to his unsettled habits—and schooled him occasionally after his own fashion. Thus he writes in 1777:—“Brown is here; I think rather faster than ordinary, but no wiser. You cannot imagine the tenderness they all have of his tender places, and with how unfeeling a hand I probe them.”—Ed.

Towne is so far “unknown to fame” that his career is unrecorded by our biographers; he was content to work for, and under the guidance of Warburton, as a literary drudge.—Ed.

Warburton, indeed, was always looking about for fresh recruits: a circumstance which appears in the curious Memoirs of the late Dr. Heathcote, written by himself. Heathcote, when young, published anonymously a pamphlet in the Middletonian controversy. By the desire of Warburton, the bookseller transmitted his compliments to the anonymous author. “I was greatly surprised,” says Heathcote, “but soon after perceived that Warburton’s state of authorship being a state of war, it was his custom to be particularly attentive to all young authors, in hopes of enlisting them into his service. Warburton was more than civil, when necessary, on these occasions, and would procure such adventurers some slight patronage.”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 536.

We are astonished at the boldness of the minor critic, when, even after the fatal edition of Warburton’s Shakspeare, he should still venture, in the life of his great friend, to assert that “this fine edition must ever be highly valued by men of sense and taste; a spirit congenial to that of the author breathing throughout!”

Is it possible that the man who wrote this should ever have read the “Canons of Criticism?” Yet is it to be supposed that he who took so lively an interest in the literary fortunes of his friend should not have read them? The Warburtonians appear to have adopted one of the principles of the Jesuits in their controversies, which was to repeat arguments which had been confuted over and over again; to insinuate that they had not been so! But this was not too much to risk by him who, in his dedication of “Horace’s Epistle to Augustus,” with a Commentary, had hardily and solemnly declared that “Warburton, in his enlarged view of things, had not only revived the two models of Aristotle and Longinus, but had rather struck out a new original plan of criticism, which should unite the virtues of each of them. This experiment was made on the two greatest of our own poets—Shakspeare and Pope. Still (he adds, addressing Warburton) you went farther, by joining to those powers a perfect insight into human nature; and so ennobling the exercise of literary by the justest moral censure, you have now, at length, advanced criticism to its full glory.”

A perpetual intercourse of mutual adulation animated the sovereign and his viceroy, and, by mutual support, each obtained the same reward: two mitres crowned the greater and the minor critic. This intercourse was humorously detected by the lively author of “Confusion Worse Confounded.”—“When the late Duke of R.,” says he, “kept wild beasts, it was a common diversion to make two of his bears drunk (not metaphorically with flattery, but literally with strong ale), and then daub them over with honey. It was excellent sport to see how lovingly (like a couple of critics) they would lick and claw one another.” It is almost amazing to observe how Hurd, who naturally was of the most frigid temperament, and the most subdued feelings, warmed, heated, and blazed in the progressive stages “of that pageantry of praise spread over the Rev. Mr. Warburton, when the latter was advancing fast towards a bishoprick,” to use the words of Dr. Parr, a sagacious observer of man. However, notwithstanding the despotic mandates of our Pichrocole and his dapper minister, there were who did not fear to meet the greater bear of the two so facetiously described above. And the author of “Confusion Worse Confounded” tells a familiar story, which will enliven the history of our great critic. “One of the bears mentioned above happened to get loose, and was running along the street in which a tinker was gravely walking. The people all cried, ‘Tinker! tinker! beware of the bear!’ Upon this Magnano faced about with great composure; and raising his staff, knocked down Bruin, then setting his arms a-kimbo, walked off very sedately; only saying, ‘Let the bear beware of the tinker,’ which is now become a proverb in those parts.”—“Confusion Worse Confounded,” p. 75.

Pope, in his energetic Letter to Lord Hervey, that “masterpiece of invective,” says Warton, which Tyers tells us he kept long back from publishing, at the desire of Queen Caroline, who was fearful her counsellor would become insignificant in the public esteem, and at last in her own, such was the power his genius exercised;—has pointed out one of these causes. It describes himself as “a private person under penal laws, and many other disadvantages, not for want of honesty or conscience; yet it is by these alone I have hitherto lived excluded from all posts of profit or trust. I can interfere with the views of no man.”

The first publisher of the “Essay on Criticism” must have been a Mr. Lewis, a Catholic bookseller in Covent-garden; for, from a descendant of this Lewis, I heard that Pope, after publication, came every day, persecuting with anxious inquiries the cold impenetrable bookseller, who, as the poem lay uncalled for, saw nothing but vexatious importunities in a troublesome youth. One day, Pope, after nearly a month’s publication, entered, and in despair tied up a number of the poems, which he addressed to several who had a reputation in town, as judges of poetry. The scheme succeeded, and the poem, having reached its proper circle, soon got into request.

He was the author of “The Key to the Lock,” written to show that “The Rape of the Lock” was a political poem, designed to ridicule the Barrier Treaty; [so called from the arrangement made at the Peace of Utrecht between the ministers of Great Britain and the States General, as to the towns on the frontiers of the Dutch, which were to be permanently strengthened as barrier fortresses. Pope, in the mask of Esdras Barnivelt, apothecary, thus makes out his poem to be a political satire. “Having said that by the lock is meant the Barrier Treaty—first then I shall discover, that Belinda represents Great Britain, or (which is the same thing) her late Majesty. This is plainly seen in the description of her,

Alluding to the ancient name of Albion, from her white cliffs, and to the cross which is the ensign of England. The baron who cuts off the lock, or Barrier Treaty, is the Earl of Oxford. Clarissa, who lent the scissors, my Lady Masham. Thalestris, who provokes Belinda to resent the loss of the lock or treaty, the Duchess of Marlborough; and Sir Plume, who is moved by Thalestris to re-demand it of Great Britain, Prince Eugene, “who came hither for that purpose.” He concludes 32 pages of similar argument by saying, “I doubt not if the persons most concerned would but order Mr. Bernard Lintott, the printer and publisher of this dangerous piece, to be taken into custody and examined, many further discoveries might be made both of this poet’s and his abettors secret designs, which are doubtless of the utmost importance to Government.” Such is a specimen of Pope’s chicanery.] Its innocent extravagance could only have been designed to increase attention to a work, which hardly required any such artifice. [In the preface to this production, “the uncommon sale of this book” is stated as one reason for the publication; “above six thousand of them have been already vended.”] In the same spirit he composed the “Guardian,” in which Phillips’s Pastorals were insidiously preferred to his own. Pope sent this ironical, panegyrical criticism on Phillips anonymously to the “Guardian,” and Steele not perceiving the drift, hesitated to publish it, till Pope advised it. Addison detected it. I doubt whether we have discovered all the supercheries of this kind. After writing the finest works of genius, he was busily employed in attracting the public attention to them. In the antithesis of his character, he was so great and so little! But he knew mankind! and present fame was the great business of his life.

Cleland was the son of Colonel Cleland, an old friend of Pope; he and his son had served in the East Indian army; but the latter returned to London, and became a sort of literary jackal to Pope, and a hack author for the booksellers. He wrote several moral and useful works; but as they did not pay well, he wrote an immoral one, for which he obtained a better price, and a pension of 100l. a-year, on condition that he never wrote in that manner again. This was obtained for him by Lord Granville, after Cleland had been cited before the Privy Council, and pleaded poverty as the reason for such authorship.—Ed.

The narrative of this dark transaction, which seems to have been imperfectly known to Johnson, being too copious for a note, will be found at the close of this article.

A list of all the pamphlets which resulted from the Dunciad would occupy a large space. Many of them were as grossly personal as the celebrated poem. The poet was frequently ridiculed under the names of “Pope Alexander” (from his dictatorial style), and “Sawney.” In “an heroic poem occasioned by the Dunciad,” published in 1728, the poet’s snug retreat at Twickenham is thus alluded to:—

A fragment of Pope’s celebrated grotto still remains; the house is destroyed. Pope spent all his spare cash over his Twickenham villa. “I never save anything,” he said once to Spence; and the latter has left a detailed account of what he meant to do in the further decoration of his garden if he had lived. As he gained a sum of money, he regularly spent it in this way.—Ed.

Pope is, perhaps, the finest character-painter of all satirists. Atterbury, after reading the portrait of Atticus, advised him to proceed in a way which his genius had pointed out; but Arbuthnot, with his dying breath, conjured him “to reform, and not to chastise;” that is, not to spare the vice, but the person. It is said, Pope answered, that, to correct the world with due effect, they become inseparable; and that, deciding by his own experience, he was justified in his opinion. Perhaps, at first, he himself wavered; but he strikes bolder as he gathers strength. The two first editions of the Dunciad, now before me, could hardly be intelligible: they exhibit lines after lines gaping with an hiatus, or obscured with initial letters: in subsequent editions, the names stole into their places. We are told, that the personalities in his satires quickened the sale: the portraits of Sporus, Bufo, Clodius, Timon, and Atossa, were purchased by everybody; but when he once declared, respecting the characters of one of his best satires, that no real persons were intended, it checked public curiosity, which was felt in the sale of that edition. Personality in his satires, no doubt, accorded with the temper and the talent of Pope; and the malice of mankind afforded him all the conviction necessary to indulge it. Yet Young could depend solely on abstract characters and pure wit; and I believe that his “Love of Fame” was a series of admirable satires, which did not obtain less popularity than Pope’s. Cartwright, one of the poetical sons of Ben Jonson, describes, by a beautiful and original image, the office of the satirist, though he praises Jonson for exercising a virtue he did not always practise; as Swift celebrates Pope with the same truth, when he sings:—

Cartwright’s lines are:—

Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, published a letter in Mist’s Journal, insisting that Pope had mistaken the whole character of Thersites, from ignorance of the language. I regret I have not drawn some notes from that essay. The subject might be made curious by a good Greek scholar, if Pope has really erred in the degree Cooke asserts. Theobald, who seems to have been a more classical scholar than has been allowed, besides some versions from the Greek tragic bards, commenced a translation of the Odyssey as soon as Pope’s Iliad appeared.

In one of these situations, Pope issued a very grave, but very ludicrous, advertisement. They had the impudence to publish an account of Pope having been flagellated by two gentlemen in Ham Walks, during his evening promenade. This was avenging Dennis for what he had undergone from the narrative of his madness. In “The Memoirs of Grub-street,” vol. i. p. 96, this tingling narrative appears to have been the ingenious forgery of Lady Mary! On this occasion, Pope thought it necessary to publish the following advertisement in the Daily Post, June 14, 1728:—

“Whereas, there has been a scandalous paper cried aloud about the streets, under the title of ‘A Pop upon Pope,’ insinuating that I was whipped in Ham Walks on Thursday last:—This is to give notice, that I did not stir out of my house at Twickenham on that day; and the same is a malicious and ill-founded report.—A.P.”

[Spence, on the authority of Pope’s half-sister, says: “When some of the people that he had put into the Dunciad were so enraged against him, and threatened him so highly, he loved to walk alone to Richmond, only he would take a large faithful dog with him, and pistols in his pocket. He used to say to us when we talked to him about it, that ‘with pistols the least man in England was above a match for the largest.’”]

It seems that Phillips hung up a birchen-rod at Button’s. Pope, in one of his letters, congratulates himself that he never attempted to use it. [His half-sister, Mrs. Rackett, testifies to Pope’s courage; she says, “My brother never knew what fear was.”]

According to the scandalous chronicle of the day, Pope, shortly after the publication of the Dunciad, had a tall Irishman to attend him. Colonel Duckett threatened to cane him, for a licentious stroke aimed at him, which Pope recanted. Thomas Bentley, nephew to the doctor, for the treatment his uncle had received, sent Pope a challenge. The modern, like the ancient Horace, was of a nature liable to panic at such critical moments. Pope consulted some military friends, who declared that his person ought to protect him from any such redundance of valour as was thus formally required; however, one of them accepted the challenge for him, and gave Bentley the option either of fighting or apologising; who, on this occasion, proved, what is usual, that the easiest of the two was the quickest done.

I shall preserve one specimen, so classically elegant, that Pope himself might have composed it. It is from the pen of that Leonard Welsted whose “Aganippe” Pope has so shamefully characterised—

Can the reader credit, after this, that Welsted, who was clerk in ordinary at the Ordnance Office, was a man of family and independence, of elegant manners and a fine fancy, but who considered poetry only as a passing amusement? He has, however, left behind, amid the careless productions of his muse, some passages wrought up with equal felicity and power. There are several original poetical views of nature scattered in his works, which have been collected by Mr. Nichols, that would admit of a comparison with some of established fame.

Welsted imagined that the spirit of English poetry was on its decline in the age of Pope, and allegorises the state of our poetry in a most ingenious comparison. The picture is exquisitely wrought, like an ancient gem: one might imagine Anacreon was turned critic:—

“The empty flask” only retaining “the costly flavour,” was the verse of Pope.

Pope was made to appear as ridiculous as possible, and often nicknamed “Poet Pug,” from the frontispiece to an attack in reply to his own, termed “Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility examined.” It represents Pope as a misshapen monkey leaning on a pile of books, in the attitude adopted by Jervas in his portrait of the poet.—Ed.

Dennis tells the whole story. “At his first coming to town he was importunate with Mr. Cromwell to introduce him to me. The recommendation engaged me to be about thrice in company with him; after which I went to the country, till I found myself most insolently attacked in his very superficial ‘Essay on Criticism,’ by which he endeavoured to destroy the reputation of a man who had published pieces of criticism, and to set up his own. I was moved with indignation to that degree, that I immediately writ remarks on that essay. I also writ upon part of his translation of ‘Homer,’ his ‘Windsor Forest,’ and his infamous ‘Temple of Fame.’” In the same pamphlet he says:—“Pope writ his ‘Windsor Forest’ in envy of Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill;’ his infamous ‘Temple of Fame’ in envy of Chaucer’s poem upon the same subject; his ‘Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,’ in envy of Dryden’s ‘Feast of Alexander.’” In reproaching Pope with his peculiar rhythm, that monotonous excellence, which soon became mechanical, he has an odd attempt at a pun:—“Boileau’s Pegasus has all his paces; the Pegasus of Pope, like a Kentish post-horse, is always upon the Canterbury.”—“Remarks upon several Passages in the Preliminaries to the Dunciad,” 1729.

Two parties arose in the literary republic, the Theobaldians and the Popeians. The “Grub-street Journal,” a kind of literary gazette of some campaigns of the time, records the skirmishes with tolerable neutrality, though with a strong leaning in favour of the prevailing genius.

The Popeians did not always do honour to their great leader; and the Theobaldians proved themselves, at times, worthy of being engaged, had fate so ordered it, in the army of their renowned enemy. When Young published his “Two Epistles to Pope, on the Authors of the Age,” there appeared “One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope, in Answer to two of Dr. Young’s.” On this, a Popeian defends his master from some extravagant accusations in “The Grub-street Memoirs.” He insists, as his first principle, that all accusations against a man’s character without an attestor are presumed to be slanders and lies, and in this case every gentleman, though “Knight of the Bathos,” is merely a liar and scoundrel.

“You assure us he is not only a bad poet, but a stealer from bad poets: if so, you have just cause to complain of invasion of property. You assure us he is not even a versifier, but steals the sound of his verses; now, to steal a sound is as ingenious as to paint an echo. You cannot bear gentlemen should be treated as vermin and reptiles; now, to be impartial, you were compared to flying-fishes, didappers, tortoises, and parrots, &c., not vermin, but curious and beautiful creatures”—alluding to the abuse, in this “Epistle,” on such authors as Atterbury, Arbuthnot, Swift, the Duke of Buckingham, &c. The Popeian concludes:—

“After all, your poem, to comfort you, is more innocent than the Dunciad; for in the one there’s no man abused but is very well pleased to be abused in such company; whereas in the other there’s no man so much as named, but is extremely affronted to be ranked with such people as style each other the dullest of men.”

The publication of the Dunciad, however, drove the Theobaldians out of the field. Guerillas, such as the “One Epistle,” sometimes appeared, but their heroes struck and skulked away. A Theobaldian, in an epigram, compared the Dunciad of Pope to the offspring of the celebrated Pope Joan. The neatness of his wit is hardly blunted by a pun. He who talks of Pope’s “stealing a sound,” seems to have practised that invisible art himself, for the verse is musical as Pope’s.

The answers to this epigram by the Popeians are too gross. The “One Epistle” is attributed to James Moore Smyth, in alliance with Welsted and other unfortunate heroes.

The six Letters are preserved in Ruffhead’s Appendix, No. 1.

Curll was a bookseller, from whose shop issued many works of an immoral class, yet he chose for his sign “The Bible and Dial,” which were displayed over his shop in Fleet-street. The satire of Pope’s Dunciad seems fairly to have been earned, as we may judge from the class of books still seen in the libraries of curious collectors, and which are certainly unfitted for more general circulation. For these publications he was fined by the Court of King’s Bench, and on one occasion stood in the pillory as a punishment. Yet himself and Lintot were the chief booksellers of the era, until Tonson arose, and by taking a more enlarged view of the trade, laid the foundation of the great publishing houses of modern times.—Ed.

Cromwell was one of the gay young men who frequented coffee-houses and clubs when Pope, also a young man, did the same, and corresponded freely with him for a few years, when the intimacy almost entirely ceased. The lady was a Mrs. Thomas, who became a sort of literary hack to Curll, and is celebrated in the Dunciad under the name of Corinna. Roscoe, in his edition of Pope, says, “Of Henry Cromwell little is known, further than what is learnt from this correspondence, from which he appears to have been a man of respectable connections, talents, and education, and to have intermingled pretty freely in the gallantries of fashionable life.” He seems to have been somewhat eccentric, and the correspondence of Pope only lasted from 1708 to 1711.—Ed.

Pope, in his conversations with Spence, says, “My letters to Cromwell were written with a design that does not generally appear: they were not written in sober sadness.”—Ed.

Pope’s victory over Curll is represented by Hogarth in a print ostentatiously hung in the garret of his “Distressed Poet.”—Ed.

Johnson says, that though “Pope attacked Cibber with acrimony, the provocation is not easily discoverable.” But the statements of Cibber, which have never been contradicted, show sufficient motives to excite the poetic irascibility. It was Cibber’s “fling” at the unowned and condemned comedy of the triumvirate of wits, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, when he performed Bayes in the Rehearsal, that incurred the immortal odium. There was no malice on Cibber’s side; for it was then the custom to restore the zest of that obsolete dramatic satire, by introducing allusions to any recent theatrical event. The plot of this ridiculous comedy hinging on the deep contrivance of two lovers getting access to the wife of a virtuoso, “one curiously swathed up like an Egyptian mummy, and the other slily covered in the pasteboard skin of a crocodile,” was an incident so extremely natural, that it seemed congenial with the high imagination and the deep plot of a Bayes! Poor Cibber, in the gaiety of his impromptu, made the “fling;” and, unluckily, it was applauded by the audience! The irascibility of Pope too strongly authenticated one of the three authors. “In the swelling of his heart, after the play was over, he came behind the scenes with his lips pale and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult; and accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses would be capable of, choked with the foam of his passion.” Cibber replied with dignity, insisted on the privilege of the character, and that he would repeat the same jest as long as the public approved of it. Pope would have certainly approved of Cibber’s manly conduct, had he not been the author himself. To this circumstance may be added the reception which the town and the court bestowed on Cibber’s “Nonjuror,” a satire on the politics of the jacobite faction; Pope appears, under the assumed name of Barnevelt, to have published “an odd piece of wit, proving that the Nonjuror, in its design, its characters, and almost every scene of it, was a closely-couched jacobite libel against the Government.” Cibber says that “this was so shrewdly maintained, that I almost liked the jest myself.” Pope seems to have been fond of this new species of irony; for, in the Pastorals of Phillips, he showed the same sort of ingenuity, and he repeated the same charge of political mystery against his own finest poem; for he proved by many “merry inuendoes,” that “The Rape of the Lock” was as audacious a libel as the pretended Barnevelt had made out the Nonjuror to be. See note, p. 280.

Cibber did not obtrude himself in this contest. Had he been merely a poor vain creature, he had not preserved so long a silence. His good-temper was without anger, but he remonstrates with no little dignity, when he chooses to be solemn; though to be playful was more natural to him. “If I have lain so long stoically silent, or unmindful of your satirical favours, it was not so much for want of a proper reply, as that I thought there never needed a public one; for all people of sense would know what truth or falsehood there was in what you said of me, without my wisely pointing it out to them. Nor did I choose to follow your example, of being so much a self-tormentor, as to be concerned at whatever opinion of me any published invective might infuse into people unknown to me. Even the malicious, though they may like the libel, don’t always believe it.” His reason for reply is, that his silence should not be farther reproached “as a plain confession of my being a bankrupt in wit, if I don’t immediately answer those bills of discredit you have drawn upon me.” There is no doubt that Cibber perpetually found instigators to encourage these attacks; and one forcible argument he says was, that “a disgrace, from such a pen, would stick upon me to posterity.” He seems to be aware that his acquaintance cheer him to the lists “for their particular amusement.”

“His edition of Shakspeare proved no better than a foil to set off the superiority of Theobald’s; and Cibber bore away the palm from him in the drama. We have an account of two attempts of Pope’s, one in each of the two principal branches of this species of poetry, and both unsuccessful. The fate of the comedy has been already mentioned (in page 300), and the tragedy was saved from the like fate by one not less ignominious, being condemned and burnt by his own hands. It was called Cleone, and formed upon the same story as a late one wrote and published by Mr. Dodsley with the same title in 1759. See Dodsley’s Preface.”—Biographia Britannica, 1760.

Armstrong, who was a keen observer of man, has expressed his uncommon delight in the company of Cibber. “Beside his abilities as a writer (as a writer of comedies, Armstrong means), and the singular variety of his powers as an actor, he was to the last one of the most agreeable, cheerful, and best-humoured men you would ever wish to converse with.”—Warton’s Pope, vol. iv. 160.

Cibber was one of those rare beings whose dispositions Hume describes “as preferable to an inheritance of 10,000l. a year.”

Dr. Aikin, in his Biographical Dictionary, has thus written on Cibber: “It cannot be doubted, that, at the time, the contest was more painful to Pope than to Cibber. But Pope’s satire is immortal, whereas Cibber’s sarcasms are no longer read. Cibber may therefore be represented to future times with less credit for abilities than he really deserves; for he was certainly no dunce, though not, in the higher sense of the word, a man of genius. His effrontery and vanity could not be easily overcharged, even by a foe. Indeed, they are striking features in the portrait drawn by himself.” Dr. Aikin’s political morality often vented its indignation at the successful injustice of great power! Why should not the same spirit conduct him in the Literary Republic? With the just sentiments he has given on Cibber, it was the duty of an intrepid critic to raise a moral feeling against the despotism of genius, and to have protested against the arbitrary power of Pope. It is participating in the injustice to pass it by, without even a regret at its effect.

As for Cibber himself, he declares he was not impudent, and I am disposed to take his own word, for he modestly asserts this, in a remark on Pope’s expression,

“by which I find you modestly mean Cibberian impudence, as a sample of the strongest.—Sir, your humble servant—but pray, sir, in your ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (where, by the way, in your ample description of a great Poet, you slily hook in a whole hat-full of virtues to your own character) have not you this particular line?

Cibber laments it is not so, for “any accusation in smooth verse will always sound well, though it is not tied down to have a tittle of truth in it, when the strongest defence in poor humble prose, not having that harmonious advantage, takes nobody by the ear—very hard upon an innocent man! For suppose in prose, now, I were as confidently to insist that you were an honest, good-natured, inoffensive creature, would my barely saying so be any proof of it? No sure. Why then, might it not be supposed an equal truth, that both our assertions were equally false? Yours, when you call me impudent; mine, when I call you modest, &c. While my superiors suffer me occasionally to sit down with them, I hope it will be thought that rather the Papal than the Cibberian forehead ought to be out of countenance.” I give this as a specimen of Cibber’s serious reasonings—they are poor; and they had been so from a greater genius; for ridicule and satire, being only a mere abuse of eloquence, can never be effectually opposed by truisms. Satire must be repelled by satire; and Cibber’s sarcasms obtained what Cibber’s reasonings failed in.

Vain as Cibber has been called, and vain as he affects to be, he has spoken of his own merits as a comic writer,—and he was a very great one,—with a manly moderation, very surprising indeed in a vain man. Pope has sung in his Dunciad, most harmoniously inhuman,

Blasting as was this criticism, it could not raise the anger of the gay and careless Cibber. Yet what could have put it to a sharper test? Johnson and Ozell are names which have long disappeared from the dramatic annals, and could only have been coupled with Cibber to give an idea of what the satirist meant by “the human genius of an ape.” But listen to the mild, yet the firm tone of Cibber—he talks like injured innocence, and he triumphs over Pope, in all the dignity of truth.—I appeal to Cibber’s posterity!

“And pray, sir, why my name under this scurvy picture? I flatter myself, that if you had not put it there, nobody else would have thought it like me; nor can I easily believe that you yourself do: but perhaps you imagined it would be a laughing ornament to your verse, and had a mind to divert other people’s spleen with it as well as your own. Now let me hold up my head a little, and then we shall see how the features hit me.” He proceeds to relate, how “many of those plays have lived the longer for my meddling with them.” He mentions several, which “had been dead to the stage out of all memory, which have since been in a constant course of acting above these thirty or forty years.” And then he adds: “Do those altered plays at all take from the merit of those more successful pieces, which were entirely my own?—When a man is abused, he has a right to speak even laudable truths of himself, to confront his slanderer. Let me therefore add, that my first Comedy of The Fool in Fashion was as much (though not so valuable) an original, as any work Mr. Pope himself has produced. It is now forty-seven years since its first appearance on the stage, where it has kept its station, to this very day, without ever lying one winter dormant. Nine years after this, I brought on The Careless Husband, with still greater success; and was that too

Let the many living spectators of these plays, then, judge between us, whether the above verses came from the honesty of a satirist, who would be thought, like you, the upright censor of mankind. Sir, this libel was below you! Satire, without truth, recoils upon its author, and must, at other times, render him suspected of prejudice, even where he may be just; as frauds, in religion, make more atheists than converts; and the bad heart, Mr. Pope, that points an injury with verse, makes it the more unpardonable, as it is not the result of sudden passion, but of an indulged and slowly-meditating ill-nature. What a merry mixed mortal has nature made you, that can debase that strength and excellence of genius to the lowest human weakness, that of offering unprovoked injuries, at the hazard of your being ridiculous too, when the venom you spit falls short of your aim!” I have quoted largely, to show that Cibber was capable of exerting a dignified remonstrance, as well as pointing the lightest, yet keenest, shafts of sarcastic wit.

Ayre’s “Memoirs of Pope,” vol. ii. p. 82.

Even the “Grub-street Journal” had its jest on his appointment to the laureateship. In No. 52 was the following epigram:—

It may be reasonably doubted, however, if vanity had not something to do with this—the vanity of appearing as a philosophical writer, and astonishing the friends who had considered him only as a good comedian. The volume was magnificently printed in quarto on fine paper, “for the author,” in 1747. It is entitled, “The Character and Conduct of Cicero Considered, from the History of his Life by the Rev. Dr. Middleton; with occasional Essays and Observations upon the most Memorable Facts and Persons during that Period.” The entire work is a series of somewhat too-familiar notes on the various passages of “Cicero’s Life and Times,” as narrated by Middleton. He terms the unsettled state after the death of Sylla “an uncomfortable time for those sober citizens who had a mind and a right to be quiet.” His professional character breaks forth when he speaks of Roscius instructing Cicero in acting; and in the very commencement of his grave labour he rambles back to the theatre to quote a scene from Vanbrugh’s Relapse, as a proof how little fashionable readers think while they read. Colley’s well-meaning but free-and-easy reflections on the gravities of Roman history, in the progress of his work, are remarkable, and have all the author’s coarse common sense, but very little depth or refinement—Ed.

With what good-humour he retorts a piece of sly malice of Pope’s; who, in the notes to the Dunciad, after quoting Jacob’s account of Cibber’s talents, adds—“Mr. Jacob omitted to remark that he is particularly admirable in tragedy.” To which Cibber rejoins—“Ay, sir, and your remark has omitted, too, that (with all his commendations) I can’t dance upon the rope, or make a saddle, nor play upon the organ. My dear, dear Mr. Pope, how could a man of your stinging capacity let so tame, so low a reflection escape him? Why, this hardly rises above the petty malice of Miss Molly. ‘Ay, ay, you may think my sister as handsome as you please, but if you were to see her legs!’ If I have made so many crowded theatres laugh, and in the right place, too, for above forty years together, am I to make up the number of your dunces, because I have not the equal talent of making them cry too? Make it your own case. Is what you have excelled in at all the worse for your having so dismally dabbled in the farce of Three Hours after Marriage? What mighty reason will the world have to laugh at my weakness in tragedy, more than at yours in comedy?”

I will preserve one anecdote of that felicity of temper—that undisturbed good-humour which never abandoned Cibber in his most distressful moments. When he brought out, in 1724, his CÆsar in Egypt, at a great expense, and “a beggarly account of empty boxes” was the result, it raised some altercations between the poet and his brother managers, the bard still struggling for another and another night. At length he closed the quarrel with a pun, which confessed the misfortune, with his own good-humour. In a periodical publication of the times I find the circumstance recorded in this neat epigram:—

A wicked wag of a lord had enticed Pope into a tavern, and laid a love-plot against his health. Cibber describes his resolute interference by snatching “our little Homer by the heels. This was done for the honour of our nation. Homer would have been too serious a sacrifice to our evening’s amusement.” He has metamorphosed our Apollo into a “Tom-tit;” but the Ovidian warmth, however ludicrous, will not now admit of a narrative. This story, by our comic writer, was accompanied by a print, that was seen by more persons, probably, than read the Dunciad. In his second letter, Cibber, alluding to the vexation of Pope on this ridiculous story, observes—“To have been exposed as a bad man, ought to have given thee thrice the concern of being shown a ridiculous lover.” And now that he had discovered that he could touch the nerves of Pope, he throws out one of the most ludicrous analogies to the figure of our bard:—“When crawling in thy dangerous deed of darkness, I gently, with a finger and a thumb, picked off thy small round body by thy long legs, like a spider making love in a cobweb.”

How many good authors might pursue their studies in quiet, would they never reply to their critics but on matters of fact, in which their honour may be involved. I have seen very tremendous criticisms on some works of real genius, like serpents on marble columns, wind and dart about, and spit their froth, but they die away on the pillars that enabled them to erect their malignant forms to the public eye. They fall in due time; and weak must be the substance of that pillar which does not stand, and look as beautiful, when the serpents have crawled over it, as before. Dr. Brown, in his “Letter to Bishop Lowth,” has laid down an axiom in literary criticism:—“A mere literary attack, however well or ill-founded, would not easily have drawn me into a public expostulation; for every man’s true literary character is best seen in his own writings. Critics may rail, disguise, insinuate, or pervert; yet still the object of their censures lies equally open to all the world. Thus the world becomes a competent judge of the merits of the work animadverted on. Hence, the mere author hath a fair chance for a fair decision, at least among the judicious; and it is of no mighty consequence what opinions the injudicious form concerning mental abilities. For this reason, I have never replied to any of those numerous critics who have on different occasions honoured me with their regard.”

Sir William Blackstone’s Discussion on the Quarrel between Addison and Pope was communicated by Dr. Kippis in his “Biographia Britannica,” vol. i. p. 56. Blackstone is there designated as “a gentleman of considerable rank, to whom the public is obliged for works of much higher importance.”

Dennis asserts in one of his pamphlets that Pope, fermenting with envy at the success of Addison’s Cato, went to Lintot, and persuaded him to engage this redoubted critic to write the remarks on Cato—that Pope’s gratitude to Dennis for having complied with his request was the well-known narrative of Dennis “being placed as a lunatic in the hands of Dr. Norris, a curer of mad people, at his house in Hatton-garden, though at the same time I appeared publicly every day, both in the park and in the town.” Can we suppose that Dennis tells a falsehood respecting Pope’s desiring Lintot to engage Dennis to write down Cato? If true, did Pope wish to see Addison degraded, and at the same time take an opportunity of ridiculing the critic, without, however, answering his arguments? The secret history of literature is like that of politics?

[Dennis took a strong dislike to Addison’s Cato, and his style of criticism is thus alluded to in the humorous account of his frenzy written by Pope: “On all sides of his room were pinned a great many sheets of a tragedy called Cato, with notes on the margin by his own hand. The words absurd, monstrous, execrable, were everywhere written in such large characters, that I could read them without my spectacles.” Warton says that “Addison highly disapproved of this bitter satire on Dennis, and Pope was not a little chagrined at this disapprobation; for the narrative was intended to court the favour of Addison, by defending his Cato: in which seeming defence Addison was far from thinking our author sincere.”]

In the notes to the Prologue to the Satires.

Pope’s conjecture was perfectly correct. Dr. Warton confirms it from a variety of indisputable authorities.—Warton’s “Pope,” vol. iv. p. 34.

In the “Freeholder,” May, 1716.

Pope himself thus related the matter to Spence: “Phillips seemed to have been encouraged to abuse me in coffee-houses and conversations; and Gildon wrote a thing about Wycherly, in which he had abused both me and my relations very grossly. Lord Warwick himself told me one day that it was in vain for me to endeavour to be well with Mr. Addison; that his jealous temper would never admit of a settled friendship between us, and to convince me of what he had said, assured me that Addison had encouraged Gildon to publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas after they were published.”—Ed.

The strongest parts of Sir William Blackstone’s discussion turn on certain inaccurate dates of Ruffhead, in his statements, which show them to be inconsistent with the times when they are alleged to have happened. These erroneous dates had been detected in an able article in the Monthly Review on that work, April, 1769. Ruffhead is a tasteless, confused, and unskilful writer—Sir William has laid great stress on the incredible story of Addison paying Gildon to write against Pope, “a man so amiable in his moral character.” It is possible that the Earl of Warwick, who conveyed the information, might have been a malicious, lying youth; but then Pope had some knowledge of mankind—he believed the story, for he wrote instantly, with honest though heated feelings, to Addison, and sent him, at that moment, the first sketch of the character of Atticus. Addison used him very civilly ever after—but it does not appear that Addison ever contradicted the tale of the officious Earl. All these facts, which Pope repeated many years after to Spence, Sir William was not acquainted with, for they were transcribed from Spence’s papers by Johnson, after Blackstone had written. [This is fully in accordance with his previous conduct, as he described it to Spence; on the first notification of the Earl of Warwick’s news, “the next day when I was heated with what I had heard, I wrote a letter to Mr. Addison, to let him know that I was not unacquainted with this behaviour of his; that if I was to speak severely of him, in return for it, it should not be in such a dirty way; and that I should rather tell himself freely of his faults, and allow his good qualities; and that it should be something in the following manner: I then adjoined the first sketch of what has since been called my Satire on Addison. Mr. Addison used me very civilly ever after, and never did me any injustice that I know of from that time to his death, which was about three years after.”]

That Addison did occasionally divert Pope’s friends from him, appears from the advice which Lady Mary Wortley Montague says he gave to her—“Leave him as soon as you can, he will certainly play you some devilish trick else: he has an appetite to satire.” Malone thinks this may have been said under the irritation produced by the verses on Addison, which Pope sent to him, as described above. Pope’s love of satire, and unflinching use of it, was as conspicuous as Addison’s nervous dislike to it.—Ed.

From Lord Egmont’s MS. Collections.—See the “Addenda Kippis’s Biographia Britannica.”

The earliest and most particular narrative of this remarkable interview I have hitherto only traced to “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of A. Pope, Esq., by William Ayre, Esq.,” 1745, vol. i. p. 100. This work comes in a very suspicious form; it is a huddled compilation, yet contains some curious matters; and pretends, in the title-page, to be occasionally drawn from “original MSS. and the testimonies of persons of honour.” He declares, in the preface, that he and his friends “had means and some helps which were never public.” He sometimes appeals to several noble friends of Pope as his authorities. But the mode of its publication, and that of its execution, are not in its favour. These volumes were written within six months of the decease of our poet; have no publisher’s name; and yet the author, whoever he was, took out “a patent, under his majesty’s royal signet,” for securing the copyright. This Ayre is so obscure an author, though a translator of Tasso’s “Aminta,” that he seems to have escaped even the minor chronicles of literature. At the time of its publication there appeared “Remarks on Squire Ayre’s Memoirs of Pope.” The writer pretends he has discovered him to be only one of the renowned Edmund Curll’s “squires,” who, about that time, had created an order of literary squires, ready to tramp at the funeral of every great personage with his life. The “Remarker” then addresses Curll, and insinuates he speaks from personal knowledge of the man:—“You have an adversaria of title-pages of your own contrivance, and which your authors are to write books to. Among what you call the occasional, or black list, I have seen Memoirs of Dean Swift, Pope, &c.” Curll, indeed, was then sending forth many pseudo squires, with lives of “Congreve,” “Mrs. Oldfield,” &c.; all which contained some curious particulars, picked up in coffee-houses, conversations, or pamphlets of the day. This William Ayre I accept as “a squire of low degree,” but a real personage. As for this interview, Ayre was certainly incompetent to the invention of a single stroke of the conversations detailed: where he obtained all these interesting particulars, I have not discovered. Johnson alludes to this interview, states some of its results, but refers to no other authority than floating rumours.

The line stood originally, and nearly literally copied from Isaiah—

which Steele retouched, as it now stands—

Dr. Warton prefers the rejected verse. The latter, he thinks, has too much of modern quaintness. The difficulty of choice lies between that naked simplicity which scarcely affects, and those strokes of art which are too apparent.

The last line of Addison’s tragedy read originally—

A very weak line, which was altered at the suggestion of Pope as it stands at present:—

At the time, to season the tale for the babble of Literary Tattlers, it was propagated that Pope intended, on the death of Bolingbroke, to sell this eighteenpenny pamphlet at a guinea a copy; which would have produced an addition of as many hundreds to the thousands which the poet had honourably reaped from his Homer. This was the ridiculous lie of the day, which lasted long enough to obtain its purpose, and to cast an odium on the shade of Pope. Pope must have been a miserable calculator of survivorships, if ever he had reckoned on this.

Splendid as was the genius of Bolingbroke, the gigantic force of Warburton obtained the superiority. Had the contest solely depended on the effusions of genius, Bolingbroke might have prevailed; but an object more important than human interests induced the poet to throw himself into the arms of Warburton.

The “Essay on Man” had been reformed by the subtle aid of Warburton, in opposition to the objectionable principles which Bolingbroke had infused into his system of philosophy: this, no doubt, had vexed Bolingbroke. But another circumstance occurred of a more mortifying nature. When Pope one day showed Warburton Bolingbroke’s “Letters on the Study and Use of History,” printed, but not published, and concealing the name of the author, Warburton not only made several very free strictures on that work, but particularly attacked a digression concerning the authenticity of the Old Testament. Pope requested him to write his remarks down as they had occurred, which he instantly did; and Pope was so satisfied with them, that he crossed out the digression in the printed book, and sent the animadversions to Lord Bolingbroke, then at Paris. The style of the great dogmatist, thrown out in heat, must no doubt have contained many fiery particles, all which fell into the most inflammable of minds. Pope soon discovered his officiousness was received with indignation. Yet when Bolingbroke afterwards met Warburton he dissimulated: he used the language of compliment, but in a tone which claimed homage. The two most arrogant geniuses who ever lived, in vain exacted submission from each other: they could allow of no divided empire, and they were born to hate each other. Bolingbroke suppressed his sore feelings, for at that very time he was employed in collecting matter to refute the objections; treasuring up his secret vengeance against Pope and Warburton, which he threw out immediately on the death of Pope. I collect these particulars from Ruffhead, p. 527, and whenever, in that volume, Warburton’s name is introduced, it must be considered as coming from himself.

The reasonings of Bolingbroke appear at times to have disturbed the religious faith of our poet, and he owed much to Warburton in having that faith confirmed. But Pope rejected, with his characteristic good sense, Warburton’s tampering with him to abjure the Catholic religion. On the belief of a future state, Pope seems often to have meditated with great anxiety; and an anecdote is recorded of his latest hours, which shows how strongly that important belief affected him. A day or two before his death he was at times delirious, and about four o’clock in the morning he rose from bed and went to the library, where a friend who was watching him found him busily writing. He persuaded him to desist, and withdrew the paper he had written. The subject of the thoughts of the delirious poet was a new theory on the “Immortality of the Soul,” in which he distinguished between those material objects which tended to strengthen his conviction, and those which weakened it. The paper which contained these disordered thoughts was shown to Warburton, and surely has been preserved.

“A letter to the Lord Viscount B——ke, occasioned by his treatment of a deceased friend.” Printed for A. Moore, without date. This pamphlet either came from Warburton himself, or from one of his intimates. The writer, too, calls Pope his friend.

We find also the name of Mallet closely connected with another person of eminence, the Patriot-Poet, Leonidas Glover. I take this opportunity of correcting a surmise of Johnson’s in his Life of Mallet, respecting Glover, and which also places Mallet’s character in a true light.

A minute life of Mallet might exhibit a curious example of mediocrity of talent, with but suspicious virtues, brought forward by the accident of great connexions, placing a bustling intriguer much higher in the scale of society than “our philosophy ever dreamt of.” Johnson says of Mallet, that “It was remarkable of him, that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend.” From having been accidentally chosen as private tutor to the Duke of Montrose, he wound himself into the favour of the party at Leicester House; he wrote tragedies conjointly with Thomson, and was appointed, with Glover, to write the Life of the Duke of Marlborough. Yet he had already shown to the world his scanty talent for biography in his “Life of Lord Bacon,” on which Warburton so acutely animadverted.

According to Johnson’s account, the Duchess of Marlborough assigned the task of writing the Life of the Duke to Glover and to Mallet, with a remuneration of a thousand pounds. She must, however, have mortified the poets by subjoining the sarcastic prohibition that “no verses should be inserted.” Johnson adds, “Glover, I suppose, rejected with disdain the legacy, and devolved the whole work upon Mallet.”

The cause why Glover declined this work could not, indeed, be known to Johnson: it arose from a far more dignified motive than the petty disdain of the legacy, which our great literary biographer has surmised. It can now be told in his own words, which I derive from a very interesting extract communicated to me by my friend Mr. Duppa, from that portion of the MS. Memoirs of Glover not yet published.

I shall first quote the remarkable codicil from the original will of her Grace, which Mr. Duppa took the pains to consult. She assigns her reasons for the choice of her historians, and discriminates between the two authors. After bequeathing the thousand pounds for them, she adds: “I believe Mr. Glover is a very honest man, who wishes, as I do, all the good that can happen, to preserve the liberties and laws of England. Mr. Mallet was recommended to me by the late Duke of Montrose, whom I admired extremely for his great steadiness and behaviour in all things that related to the preservation of our laws and the public good.”—Thus her Grace has expressed a personal knowledge and confidence in Glover, distinctly marked from her “recommended” acquaintance Mallet.

Glover refused the office of historian, not from “disdain of the legacy,” nor for any deficient zeal for the hero whom he admired. He refused it with sorrowful disappointment; for, besides the fantastical restrictions of “not writing any verses;” and the cruel one of yoking such a patriot with the servile Mallet, there was one which placed the revision of the work in the hands of the Earl of Chesterfield: this was the circumstance at which the dignified genius of Glover revolted. Chesterfield’s mean political character had excited his indignation; and he has drawn a lively picture of this polished nobleman’s “eager prostitution,” in his printed Memoirs, recently published under the title of “Memoirs of a celebrated Literary and Political Character,” p. 24.

In the following passage, this great-minded man, for such he was, “unburthens his heart in a melancholy digression from his plain narrative.”

“Composing such a narrative (alluding to his own Memoirs) and endeavouring to establish such a temper of mind, I cannot at intervals refrain from regret that the capricious restrictions in the Duchess of Marlborough’s will, appointing me to write the life of her illustrious husband, compelled me to reject the undertaking. There, conduct, valour, and success abroad; prudence, perseverance, learning, and science, at home; would have shed some portion of their graces on their historian’s page: a mediocrity of talent would have felt an unwonted elevation in the bare attempt of transmitting so splendid a period to succeeding ages.” Such was the dignified regret of Glover!

Doubtless, he disdained, too, his colleague; but Mallet reaped the whole legacy, and still more, a pension: pretending to be always occupied on the Life of Marlborough, and every day talking of the great discoveries he had made, he contrived to make this nonentity serve his own purposes. Once hinting to Garrick, that, in spite of chronology, by some secret device of anticipation, he had reserved a niche in this great work for the Roscius of his own times, the gratitude of Garrick was instant. He recollected that Mallet was a tragedy-writer; and it also appeared that our dramatic bardling had one ready. As for the pretended Life of Marlborough, not a line appears ever to have been written!

Such was the end of the ardent solicitude and caprice of the Duchess of Marlborough, exemplified in the last solemn act of life, where she betrayed the same warmth of passion, and the same arrogant caprice she had always indulged, at the cost of her judgment, in what Pope emphatically terms “the trade of the world.” She was

Even in this darling project of her last ambition, to immortalise her name, she had incumbered it with such arrogant injunctions, mixed up such contrary elements, that they were certain to undo their own purpose. Such was the barren harvest she gathered through a life of passion, regulated by no principle of conduct. One of the most finished portraits of Pope is the Atossa, in his “Epistle on Woman.” How admirably he shows what the present instant proves, that she was one who, always possessing the means, was sure to lose the ends.

“Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by several Hands,” 1712.—The second edition appeared in 1714; and in the title-page are enumerated the poems mentioned in this account, and Pope’s name affixed, as if he were the actual editor—an idea which Mr. Nichols thought he affected to discountenance. It is probable that Pope was the editor. We see, by this account, that he was paid for his contributions.

This was a new edition, published conjointly by Lintot and Lewis, the Catholic bookseller and early friend of Pope, of whom, and of the first edition, 1711, I have preserved an anecdote, p. 280.

The late Isaac Reed, in the Biog. Dramatica, was uncertain whether Gay was the author of this unacted drama. It is a satire on the inhuman frolics of the bucks and bloods of those days, who imitated the savageness of the Indians whose name they assumed.[244] Why Gay repurchased “The Mohocks,” remains to be discovered. Was it another joint production with Pope?—The literary co-partnership between Pope and Gay has never been opened to the curious. It is probable that Pope was consulted, if not concerned, in writing “The What d’ye call it?” which, Jacob says in his “Poetical Register,” “exposes several of our eminent poets.” Jacob published while Gay was living, and seems to allude to this literary co-partnership; for, speaking of Gay, he says: “that having an inclination to poetry, by the strength of his own genius, and the conversation of Mr. Pope, he has made some progress in poetical writings.”

This tragi-comical farce of “The Mohocks” is satirically dedicated to Dennis, “as a horrid and tremendous piece, formed on the model of his own ‘Appius and Virginia.’” This touch seems to come from the finger of Pope. It is a mock-tragedy, for the Mohocks themselves rant in blank verse; a feeble performance, far inferior to its happier predecessor, “The What d’ye call it?”

The brutal amusements of these “Mohocks,” and the helpless terror of London, is scarcely credible in modern days. Wild bands of drunken men nightly infested the streets, attacking and ill-using every passer-by. A favourite pastime was to surround their victim with drawn swords, pricking him on every side as he endeavoured to escape. Many persons were maimed and dangerously wounded. Gay, in his Trivia, has noted some of their more innocent practical jokes; and asks—

Swift, in his notes to Stella, has expressed his dread, while in London, of being maimed, or perhaps killed, by them.—Ed.

Bought of Mr. George Strahan, bookseller.

For an account of these humorous pieces, see the following article on “The Royal Society.”

The fullest account we have of Settle, a busy scribe in his day, is in Mr. Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. i. p. 41.

It was the custom when party feeling ran high on the subject of papacy, towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, to get up these solemn mock-processions of the Pope and Cardinals, accompanied with figures to represent Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, and other subjects well adapted to heat popular feelings, and parade them through the streets of London. The day chosen for this was the anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth (Nov. 17), and when the procession reached Temple-bar, the figure of the Pope was tossed from his chair by one dressed as the Devil into a great bonfire made opposite the statue of Queen Elizabeth, on the city side of Temple-bar. Two rare tracts describe these “solemn mock-processions,” as they are termed, in 1679 and 1680. Prints were also published depicting the whole proceedings, and descriptive pamphlets from the pen of Settle, who arranged these shows.—Ed.

Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i., ver. 183—

This original image a late caustic wit (Horne Tooke), who probably had never read this poem, employed on a certain occasion. Godwin, who had then distinguished himself by his genius and by some hardy paradoxes, was pleading for them as hardily, by showing that they did not originate in him—that they were to be found in Helvetius, in Rousseau, and in other modern philosophers. “Ay,” retorted the cynical wit; “so you eat at my table venison and turtle, but from you the same things come quite changed!” The original, after all, is in Donne, long afterwards versified by our poet. See Warton’s edition, vol. iv. p. 257. Pope must have been an early reader of Donne.

Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i. ver. 181—

Perhaps, by ChÆrilus, the juvenile satirist designated Flecknoe, or Shadwell, who had received their immortality of dulness from his master, catholic in poetry and opinions, Dryden.

Some may be curious to have these monkish terms defined. Causes are distinguished by Aristotle into four kinds:—The material cause, ex qua, out of which things are made; the formal cause, per quam, by which a thing is that which it is, and nothing else; the efficient cause, a qua, by the agency of which anything is produced; and the final cause, propter quam, the end for which it is produced. Such are his notions in his Phys. 1. ii. c. iii., referred to by Brucker and Formey in their Histories of Philosophy. Of the Scholastic Metaphysics, Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, observes, “that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge boast that it is an excellent instrument to refine and make subtle the minds of men. But there may be a greater excess in the subtlety of men’s wits than in their thickness; as we see those threads, which are of too fine a spinning, are found to be more useless than those which are homespun and gross.”—History of the Royal Society, p. 326.

In the history of human folly, often so closely connected with that of human knowledge, some of the schoolmen (the commentators on Aquinas and others) prided themselves, and were even admired for their impenetrable obscurity! One of them, and our countryman, is singularly commended by Cardan, for that “only one of his arguments was enough to puzzle all posterity; and that, when he had grown old, he wept because he could not understand his own books.” Baker, in his Reflections upon Learning, who had examined this schoolman, declares that his obscurity is such, as if he never meant to be understood. The extravagances of the schoolmen are, however, not always those of Aristotle. Pope, and the wits of that day, like these early members of the Royal Society, decried Aristotle, who did not probably fall in the way of their studies. His great imperfections are in natural philosophy; but he still preserves his eminence for his noble treatises of Ethics, and Politics, and Poetics, notwithstanding the imperfect state in which these have reached us. Dr. Copleston and Dr. Gillies have given an energetic testimony to their perpetual value. Pope, in satirising the University as a nest of dunces, considered the followers of Aristotle as so many stalled oxen, “fat bulls of Basan.”

Swift has drawn an allegorical personage of Aristotle, by which he describes the nature of his works. “He stooped much, and made use of a staff; his visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow;” descriptive of his abrupt conciseness, his harsh style, the obscurities of his dilapidated text, and the deficiency of feeling, which his studied compression, his deep sagacity, and his analytical genius, so frequently exhibit.

Sprat makes an ingenious observation on the notion of those who declared that “the most learned ages are still the most atheistical, and the ignorant the most devout.” He says this had become almost proverbial, but he shows that piety is little beholden to those who make this distinction. “The Jewish law forbids us to offer up to God a sacrifice that has a blemish; but these men bestow the most excellent of men on the devil, and only assign to religion those men and those times which have the greatest blemish of human nature, even a defect in their knowledge and understanding.”—History of the Royal Society, p. 356.

Science, at its birth, is as much the child of imagination as curiosity; and, in rapture at the new instrument it has discovered, it impatiently magnifies its power. To the infant, all improvements are wonders; it chronicles even its dreams, and has often described what it never has seen, delightfully deceived; the cold insults of the cynics, the wits, the dull, and the idle, maliciously mortify the infant in its sports, till it returns to slow labour and patient observation. It is rather curious, however, that when science obtains a certain state of maturity, it is liable to be attacked by the same fits of the marvellous which affected its infancy;—and the following extract from one of the enthusiastic Virtuosi in the infancy of science, rivals the visions of “the perfectibility of man” of which we hear so much at this late period. Some, perhaps, may consider these strong tendencies of the imagination, breaking out at these different periods in the history of science, to indicate results, of which the mind feels a consciousness, which the philosopher should neither indulge nor check.

“Should these heroes go on (the Royal Society) as they have happily begun, they will fill the world with wonders; and posterity will find many things that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence, a voyage to the southern unknown tracts, yea, possibly the Moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies, by sympathetic conveyances, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of grey hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length, be effected without a miracle; and the turning the now-comparative desert world into a paradise, may not improbably be expected from late agriculture.

“Those that judge by the narrowness of former principles and successes, will smile at these paradoxical expectations. But the great inventions of latter ages, which altered the face of all things, in their naked proposals and mere suppositions, were to former times as ridiculous. To have talked of a new earth to have been discovered, had been a romance to antiquity; and to sail without sight of stars or shores, by the guidance of a mineral, a story more absurd than the flight of DÆdalus. That men should speak after their tongues were ashes, or communicate with each other in differing hemispheres, before the invention of letters, could not but have been thought a fiction. Antiquity would not have believed the almost incredible force of our cannons, and would as coldly have entertained the wonders of the telescope.”—Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, p. 133.

Evelyn, whose elegant mind, one would have imagined, had been little susceptible of such vehement anger, in the preface to his “Sylva,” scolds at no common rate: “Well-meaning people are led away by the noise of a few ignorant and comical buffoons, who, with an insolence suitable to their understanding, are still crying out, What have the Society done?” He attributes all the opposition and ridicule the Society encountered to a personage not usual to be introduced into a philosophical controversy—“The Enemy of Mankind.” But it was well to denounce the devil himself, as the Society had nearly lost the credit of fearing him. Evelyn insists that “next to the propagation of our most holy faith,” that of the new philosophy was desirable both for the king and the nation; “for,” he adds, “it will survive the triumphs of the proudest conquerors; since, when all their pomp and noise is ended, they are those little things in black, whom now in scorn they term philosophers and fops, to whom they must be obliged for making their names outlast the pyramids, whose founders are as unknown as the heads of the Nile.” Why Evelyn designates the philosophers as little things in black, requires explanation. Did they affect a dress of this colour in the reign of Charles II., or does he allude to the dingy appearance of the chemists?

It is not easy to credit the simplicity of these early inquirers. In a Memorial in Sprat’s History, entitled, “Answers returned by Sir Philliberto Vernatti to certain Inquiries sent by order of the Royal Society;” among some of the most extraordinary questions and descriptions of nonentities, which must have fatigued Sir Philliberto, who then resided in Batavia, I find the present:—“Qy. 8. What ground there may be for that relation concerning horns taking root, and growing about Goa?” It seems the question might as well have been asked at London, and answered by some of the members themselves; for Sir Philliberto gravely replied—“Inquiring about this, a friend laughed, and told me it was a jeer put upon the Portuguese, because the women of Goa are counted none of the chastest.” Inquiries of this nature, and often the most trivial objects set off with a singular minuteness of description, tempted the laugh of the scoffers. Their great adversary, Stubbe, ridiculing their mode of giving instructions for inquiries, regrets that the paper he received from them had been lost, otherwise he would have published it. “The great Mr. Boyle, when he brought it, tendered it with blushing and disorder,” at the simplicity of the Royal Society! And indeed the royal founder himself, who, if he was something of a philosopher, was much more of a wit, set the example. The Royal Society, on the day of its creation, was the whetstone of the wit of their patron. When Charles II. dined with the members on the occasion of constituting them a Royal Society, towards the close of the evening he expressed his satisfaction in being the first English monarch who had laid a foundation for a society who proposed that their sole studies should be directed to the investigation of the arcana of nature; and added with that peculiar gravity of countenance he usually wore on such occasions, that among such learned men he now hoped for a solution to a question which had long perplexed him. The case he thus stated:—“Suppose two pails of water were fixed in two different scales that were equally poised, and which weighed equally alike, and that two live bream, or small fish, were put into either of these pails, he wanted to know the reason why that pail, with such addition, should not weigh more than the other pail which stood against it.” Every one was ready to set at quiet the royal curiosity; but it appeared that every one was giving a different opinion. One, at length, offered so ridiculous a solution, that another of the members could not refrain from a loud laugh; when the King, turning to him, insisted that he should give his sentiments as well as the rest. This he did without hesitation, and told his majesty, in plain terms, that he denied the fact! On which the King, in high mirth, exclaimed—“Odds fish, brother, you are in the right!” The jest was not ill designed. The story was often useful, to cool the enthusiasm of the scientific visionary, who is apt often to account for what never has existed.

Pope was severe in his last book of the Dunciad on the students of insects, flowers, &c.; and R.O. Cambridge followed out the idea of a mad virtuoso in his “Scribleriad,” which he has made up from the absurd or trifling parts of natural history and philosophy. His hero is—

He collects curiosities from all parts of the world; studies occult and natural sciences; and is at last beatified by electrical glories at a meeting of hermetical philosophers. This poem is elucidated by notes, which point the allusions to the works or doings of the old philosophers.—Ed.

Evelyn, who could himself be a wit occasionally, was, however, much annoyed by the scorners. He applies to these wits a passage in Nehemiah ii. 19, which describes those who laughed at the builders of Jerusalem. “These are the Sanballats, the Horonites, who disturb our men upon the wall; but let us rise up and build!” He describes these Horonites of wit as “magnificent fops, whose talents reach but to the adjusting of their perukes.” But the Royal Society was attacked from other quarters, which ought to have assisted them. Evelyn, in his valuable treatise on forest-trees, had inserted a new project for making cider; and Stubbe insisted, that in consequence “much cider had been spoiled within these three years, by following the directions published by the commands of the Royal Society.” They afterwards announced that they never considered themselves as answerable for their own memoirs, which gave Stubbe occasion to boast that he had forced them to deny what they had written. A passage in Hobbes’s “Considerations upon his Reputation, &c.,” is as remarkable for the force of its style as for that of sense, and may be applicable to some at this day, notwithstanding the progress of science, and the importance attached to their busy idleness.

“Every man that hath spare money can get furnaces, and buy coals. Every man that hath spare money can be at the charge of making great moulds, &c., and so may have the best and greatest telescopes. They can get engines made, recipients made, and try conclusions; but they are never the more philosophers for all this. ’Tis laudable to bestow money on curious or useful delights, but that is none of the praises of a philosopher.” p. 53.

Glanvill was a learned man, but evidently superstitious, particularly in all that related to witchcraft and apparitions; the reality of both being insisted on by him in a series of books which he published at various periods of his life, and which he continually worked upon with new arguments and instances, in spite of all criticism or opposition. He was a member of the Royal Society, prebend of Worcester, and rector of Bath, where he died, October 4, 1680.—Ed.

The ninth chapter in the “Plus Ultra,” entitled “The Credit of Optic Glasses vindicated against a disputing man, who is afraid to believe his eyes against Aristotle,” gives one of the ludicrous incidents of this philosophical visit. The disputer raised a whimsical objection against the science of optics, insisting that the newly-invented glasses, the telescope, the microscope, &c., were all deceitful and fallacious; for, said the Aristotelian, “take two spectacles, use them at the same time, and you will not see so well as with one singly—ergo, your microscopes and telescopes are impostors.” How this was forced into a syllogism does not appear; but still the conclusion ran, “We can see better through one pair than two, therefore all perspectives are fallacious!”

will make a tolerable syllogism for a logician in despair. The Aristotelian was, however, somewhat puzzled by a problem which he had himself raised—“Why we cannot see with two pair of spectacles better than with one singly?” for the man of axioms observed, “Vis unita fortior,” “United strength is stronger.” It is curious enough, in the present day, to observe the sturdy Aristotelian denying these discoveries, and the praises of optics, and “the new glasses,” by Glanvill. “If this philosopher,” says the member of the Royal Society, “had spared some of those thoughts to the profitable doctrine of optics which he hath spent upon genus and species, we had never heard of this objection.” And he replies to the paradox which the Aristotelian had raised by “Why cannot he write better with two pens than with a single one, since Vis unita fortior? When he hath answered this QuÆre, he hath resolved his own. The reason he gave why it should be so, is the reason why ’tis not.” Such are the squabbles of infantine science, which cannot as yet discover causes, although it has ascertained effects.

This book was so scarce in 1757, that the writer in the “Biographia Britannica” observes that this “small but elegant treatise is still very much esteemed by the curious, being become so scarce as not to be met with in other hands.” Oldys, in 1738, had, in his “British Librarian,” selected this work among the scarce and valuable books of which he has presented us with so many useful analyses.

The history of books is often curious. At one period a book is scarce and valuable, and at another is neither one nor the other. This does not always depend on the caprice of the public, or what may be called literary fashions. Glanvill’s “Plus Ultra” is probably now of easy occurrence; like a prophecy fully completed, the uncertain event being verified, the prophet has ceased to be remembered.

His early history is given by Wood in his usual style. His father had been a Lincolnshire parson, who was obliged to leave his poor curacy because “anabaptistically inclined,” and fled to Ireland, whence his mother and her children were obliged to return on the breaking out of the rebellion of 1641, and landed at Liverpool; afterward, says Wood, “they all beated it on the hoof thence to London, where she, gaining a comfortable subsistence by her needle, sent her son Henry, being then ten years of age, to the collegiate school at Westminster. At that time Mr. Richard Busbie was the chief master, who finding the boy have pregnant parts to a miracle, did much favour and encourage him. At length Sir Henry Vane, junior (the same who was beheaded on Tower Hill, 1662), coming casually into the school with Dr. Lambert Osbaldiston, he did, at the master’s motion, take a kindness to the said boy, and gave him the liberty to resort to his house, and to fill that belly which otherwise had no sustenance but what one penny could purchase for his dinner: and as for his breakfast, he had none, except he got it by making somebody’s exercise. Soon after, Sir Henry got him to be a king’s scholar; and his master perceiving him to be beyond his years in proficiency, he gave him money to buy books, clothes, and his teaching for nothing.” Such was the humble beginning of a learned man, who lived to be a formidable opponent to the whole body of the Royal Society.—Ed.

When Sprat and Glanvill, and others, had threatened to write his life, Stubbe draws this apology for it, while he shows how much, in a time of revolutions, the Royal Society might want one for themselves.

“I was so far from being daunted at those rumours and threats, that I enlarged much this book thereupon, and resolved to charge the enemy home when I saw how weak a resistance I should meet with. I knew that recriminations were no answers. I understood well that the passages of a life like mine, spent in different places with much privacy and obscurity, was unknown to them; that even those actions they would fix their greatest calumnies upon, were such as that they understood not the grounds, nor had they learning enough and skill to condemn. I was at Westminster School when the late king was beheaded. I never took covenant nor engagement. In sum, I served my patron. I endeavoured to express my gratitude to him who had relieved me, being a child, and in great poverty (the rebellion in Ireland having deprived my parents of all means wherewith to educate me); who made me a king’s scholar; preferred me to Christchurch College, Oxon.; and who often supplied me with money when my tender years gave him little hopes of any return; and who protected me amidst the Presbyterians, and Independents, and other sects. With none thereof did I contract any relation or acquaintance; my familiarity never engaged me with ten of that party; and my genius and humour inclined me to fewer. I neither enriched, nor otherwise advanced myself, during the late troubles; and shared the common odium and dangers, not prosperity, with my benefactor. I believe no generous man, who hath the least sense of bravery, will condemn me; and I profess I am ashamed rather to have done so little, than that I have done so much, for him that so frankly obliged a stranger and a child. When Gracchus was put to death for sedition, that faithful friend and accomplice of his was dismissed, and mentioned with honour by all posterity, who, when he was impeached, justified his treason by the avowing a friendship so great that, whatever Gracchus had commanded him, he would not have declined it. And being further questioned, whether he would have burned the capitol at his bidding? he replied again, that he should have done it; but Gracchus would not bid such a thing. They that knew me heretofore, know I have a thousand times thus apologised for myself; adding, that in vassals and slaves, and persons transcendently obliged, their fidelity exempted them from all ignominy, though the principal lords, masters, and patrons, might be accounted traitors. My youth and other circumstances incapacitated me from rendering him any great services; but all that I did, and all that I writ, had no other aim than his interest; nor do I care how much any man can inodiate my former writings, as long as they were subservient to him.

“Having made this declaration, let them (or more able men than they) write the life of a man who hath some virtues of the most celebrated times, and hath preserved himself free from the vices of these. My reply shall be a scornful silence.”—Preface to Stubbe’s “Legends no Histories,” 1670.

His reasons for conformity on these important objects are given with his usual simplicity. “I have at length removed all the umbrages I ever lay under. I have joined myself to the Church of England, not only upon account of its being publicly imposed (which in things indifferent is no small consideration, as I learned from the Scottish transactions at Perth), but because it is the least defining, and consequently the most comprehensive and fitting to be national.”

He died at Bath in 1676, where he had gone in attendance upon several of his patients from the neighbourhood of Warwick, where he for a long time practised as a physician. His old antagonist Glanvill was at that time rector of the Abbey Church in which he was buried, and so became the preacher of his funeral sermon. Wood says he “said no great matter of him.”—Ed.

Pope said to Spence, “It was Dryden who made Will’s coffee-house the great resort for the wits of his time. After his death Addison transferred it to Button’s, who had been a servant of his.” Will’s coffee-house was at the corner of Bow-street, Covent-garden, and Button’s close by in Russell-street.—Ed.

“Some years after the king’s restoration he took pet against the Royal Society, (for which before he had a great veneration,) and being encouraged by Dr. Jo. Fell, no admirer of that society, became in his writings an inveterate enemy against it for several pretended reasons: among which were, first, that the members thereof intended to bring a contempt upon ancient and solid learning, upon Aristotle, to undermine the universities, and reduce them to nothing, or at least to be very inconsiderable. Secondly, that at long running to destroy the established religion, and involve the nation in popery, and I know not what, &c. So dexterous was his pen, whether pro or con, that few or none could equal, answer, or come near him. He was a person of most admirable parts, had a most prodigious memory, though his enemies would not acknowledge it, but said he read indexes; was the most noted Latinist and Grecian of his age; and after he had been put upon it, was so great an enemy to the virtuosi of his time, I mean those of the Royal Society, that, as he saith, they alarmed him with dangers and troubles even to the hazard of his life and fortunes.”—Wood.

The aspersed passage in Glanvill is this: “The philosophers of elder times, though their wits were excellent, yet the way they took was not like to bring much advantage to knowledge, or any of the uses of human life, being, for the most part, that of Notion and Dispute, which still runs round in a labyrinth of talk, but advanceth nothing. These methods, in so many centuries, never brought the world so much practical beneficial knowledge as could help towards the cure of a cut finger.” Plus Ultra, p. 7.—Stubbe, with all the malice of a wit, drew his inference, and turned the point unfairly against his adversary!

I shall here observe how much some have to answer, in a literary court of conscience, when they unfairly depreciate the works of a contemporary; and how idly the literary historian performs his task, whenever he adopts the character of a writer from another who is his adversary. This may be particularly shown in the present instance.

Morhoff, in his Polyhistor Litteraria, censures the Plus Ultra of Glanvill, conceiving that he had treated with contempt all ages and nations but his own. The German bibliographer had never seen the book, but took its character from Stubbe and Meric Casaubon. The design of the Plus Ultra, however, differs little from the other works of Glanvill, which Morhoff had seen, and has highly commended.

The political reverie of Campanella was even suspected to cover very opposite designs to those he seemed to be proposing to the world. He attempted to turn men’s minds from all inquiries into politics and religion, to mere philosophical ones. He wished that the passions of mankind might be so directed, as to spend their force in philosophical discussions, and in improvements in science. He therefore insisted on a uniformity on those great subjects which have so long agitated modern Europe; for the ancients seem to have had no wars merely for religion, and perhaps none for modes of government. One may discover an enlightened principle in the project; but the character of Campanella was a jumble of sense, subtlety, and wildness. He probably masked his real intentions. He appears an advocate for the firm establishment of the papal despotism; yet he aims to give an enlightened principle to regulate the actions of mankind. The intentions of a visionary are difficult to define. If he were really an advocate for despotism, what occasioned an imprisonment for the greater part of his days? Did he lay his project much deeper than the surface of things? Did Campanella imagine that, if men were allowed to philosophise with the utmost freedom, the despotism of religion and politics would dissolve away in the weakness of its quiescent state?

The project is a chimera—but, according to the projector, the political and religious freedom of England formed its greatest obstacle. Part of his plan, therefore, includes the means of weakening the Insular heretics by intestine divisions—a mode not seldom practised by the continental powers of France and Spain.

The political project of this fervid genius was, that his “Prince,” the Spanish king, should be the mightiest sovereign in Europe. For this, he was first to prohibit all theological controversies from the Transalpine schools, those of Germany, &c. “A controversy,” he observes, “always shows a kind of victory, and may serve as an authority to a bad cause.” He would therefore admit of no commentaries on the Bible, to prevent all diversity of opinion. He would have revived the ancient philosophical sects, instead of the modern religious sects.

The Greek and the Hebrew languages were not to be taught! for the republican freedom of the ancient Jews and Grecians had often proved destructive of monarchy. Hobbes, in the bold scheme of his Leviathan, seems to have been aware of this fatality. Campanella would substitute for these ancient languages the study of the Arabic tongue! The troublesome Transalpine wits might then employ themselves in confuting the Turks, rather than in vexing the Catholics; so closely did sagacity and extravagance associate in the mind of this wild genius. But Mathematical and Astronomical schools, and other institutions for the encouragement of the mechanical arts, and particularly those to which the northern genius is most apt, as navigation, &c., were to occupy the studies of the people, divert them from exciting fresh troubles, and withdraw them from theological factions. Campanella thus would make men great in science, having first made them slaves in politics; a philosophical people were to be the subjects of despots—not an impossible event!

His plan, remarkable enough, of weakening the English, I give in his words:—“No better way can possibly be found than by causing divisions and dissensions among them, and by continually keeping up the same; which will furnish the Spaniard and the French with advantageous opportunities. As for their religion, which is a moderated Calvinism, that cannot be so easily extinguished and rooted out there, unless there were some schools set up in Flanders, where the English have great commerce, by means of which there may be scattered abroad the seeds of schism and division. These people being of a nature which is still desirous of novelties and change, they are easily wrought over to anything.” These schools were tried at Douay in Flanders, and at Valladolid in Spain, and other places. They became nests of rebellion for the English Catholics; or for any one, who, being discontented with government, was easily converted to any religion which aimed to overturn the British Constitution. The secret history of the Roman Catholics in England remains yet to be told: they indeed had their martyrs and their heroes; but the public effects appear in the frequent executions which occurred in the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

Stubbe appears to have imagined that the Royal Society was really formed on the principle of Campanella; to withdraw the people from intermeddling with politics and religion, by engaging them merely in philosophical pursuits.—The reaction of the public mind is an object not always sufficiently indicated by historians. The vile hypocrisy and mutual persecutions of the numerous fanatics occasioned very relaxed and tolerant principles of religion at the Restoration; as, the democratic fury having spent itself, too great an indulgence was now allowed to monarchy. Stubbe was alarmed that, should Popery be established, the crown of England would become feudatory to foreign power, and embroil the nation in the restitution of all the abbey lands, of which, at the Reformation, the Church had so zealously been plundered. He was still further alarmed that the virtuosi would influence the education of our youth to these purposes; “an evil,” says he, “which has been guarded against by our ancestors in founding free-schools, by uniformity of instruction cementing men’s minds.” We now smile at these terrors; perhaps they were sometimes real. The absolute necessity of strict conformity to the prevalent religion of Europe was avowed in that unrivalled scheme of despotism, which menaced to efface every trace of popular freedom, and the independence of nations, under the dominion of Napoleon.

To this threat of writing his life, we have already noticed the noble apology he has drawn up for the versatility of his opinions. See p. 347. At the moment of the Restoration it was unwise for any of the parties to reproach another for their opinions or their actions. In a national revolution, most men are implicated in the general reproach; and Stubbe said, on this occasion, that “he had observed worse faces in the society than his own.” Waller, and Sprat, and Cowley had equally commemorated the protectorship of Cromwell and the restoration of Charles. Our satirist insidiously congratulates himself that “he had never compared Oliver the regicide to Moses, or his son to Joshua;” nor that he had ever written any Pindaric ode, “dedicated to the happy memory of the most renowned Prince Oliver, Lord Protector:” nothing to recommend “the sacred urn” of that blessed spirit to the veneration of posterity; as if

These lines were, I think, taken from Sprat himself! Stubbe adds, it would be “imprudent in them to look beyond the act of indemnity and oblivion, which was more necessary to the Royal Society than to me, who joined with no party, &c.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”

He has described this intercourse of his enemies at court with the king, where, when this punishment was suggested, “a generous personage, altogether unknown to me, being present, bravely and frankly interposed, saying, that ‘whatever I was, I was a Roman; that Englishmen were not so precipitously to be condemned to so exemplary a punishment; that representing that book to be a libel against the king was too remote a consequence to be admitted of in a nation free-born, and governed by laws, and tender of ill precedents.’” It was a noble speech, in the relaxed politics of the court of Charles II. He who made it deserved to have had his name more explicitly told: he is designated as “that excellent Englishman, the great ornament of this age, nation, and House of Commons; he whose single worth balanceth much of the debaucheries, follies, and impertinences of the kingdom.”—A Reply unto the Letter written to Mr. Henry Stubbe, Oxford, 1671, p. 20.

Stubbe gives some curious information on this subject. Harvey published his Treatise at Frankfort, 1628, but CÆsalpinus’s work had appeared in 1593. Harvey adopted the notion, and more fully and perspicuously proved it. I shall give what Stubbe says. “Harvey, in his two Answers to Riolan, nowhere asserts the invention so to himself, as to deny that he had the intimation or notion from CÆsalpinus; and his silence I take for a tacit confession. His ambition of glory made him willing to be thought the author of a paradox he had so illustrated, and brought upon the stage, where it lay unregarded, and in all probability buried in oblivion; yet such was his modesty, as not to vindicate it to himself by telling a lie.”—Stubbe’s Censure, &c., p. 112.

I give this literary anecdote, as it enters into the history of most discoveries, of which the improvers, rather than the inventors, are usually the most known to the world. Bayle, who wrote much later than Stubbe, asserts the same, and has preserved the entire passage, art. CÆsalpinus. It is said Harvey is more expressly indebted to a passage in Servetus, which Wotton has given in the preface to his “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning,” edition 1725. The notion was probably then afloat, and each alike contributed to its development. Thus it was disputed with Copernicus, whether his great discovery of a fixed sun, and the earth wheeling round that star, was his own; others had certainly observed it; yet the invention was still Copernican: for that great genius alone corrected, extended, and gave perfection to a hint, till it expanded to a system.

So gradual have often been the great inventions of genius. What others conjectured, and some discovered, Harvey demonstrated. The fate of Harvey’s discovery is a curious instance of that patience and fortitude which genius must too often exert in respect to itself. Though Harvey lived to his eightieth year, he hardly witnessed his great discovery established before he died; and it has been said, that he was the only one of his contemporaries who lived to see it in some repute. No physician adopted it; and when it got into vogue, they then disputed whether he was the inventor! Sir William Temple denied not only the discovery, but the doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood. “Sense can hardly allow it; which,” says he, “in this dispute must be satisfied as well as reason, before mankind will concur.”

Stubbe has an eloquent passage, which describes the philosophy of science. The new Experimental School had perhaps too wholly rejected some virtues of the old one; the cultivation of the human understanding, as well as the mere observation on the facts that they collected; an error which has not been entirely removed.

“That art of reasoning by which the prudent are discriminated from fools, which methodiseth and facilitates our discourses, which informs us of the validity of consequences and the probability of arguments, and manifests the fallacies of impostors; that art which gives life to solid eloquence, and which renders Statesmen, Divines, Physicians, and Lawyers accomplished; how is this cried down and vilified by the ignoramuses of these days! What contempt is there raised upon the disputative Ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics; and those moral instructions, which have produced the Alexanders and the Ptolemies, the Pompeys and the Ciceroes, are now slighted in comparison of day-labouring! Did we live at Sparta, where the daily employments were the exercises of substantial virtue and gallantry, and men, like setting dogs, were rather bred up unto, than taught reason and worth, it were a more tolerable proposal (though the different policy of these times would not admit of it); but this working, so recommended, is but the feeding of carp in the air, &c. As for the study of Politics, and all critical learning, these are either pedantical, or tedious, to those who have a shorter way of studying men.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”

“Legends no Histories,” p. 5.

Dr. King was allied to the families of Clarendon and Rochester; he took a degree as Doctor of Civil Law, and soon got into great practice. “He afterwards went with the Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant, to Ireland, where he became Judge Advocate, Sole Commissioner of the Prizes, Keeper of the Records, Vicar-General to the Lord Primate of Ireland; was countenanced by persons of the highest rank, and might have made a fortune. But so far was he from heaping up riches, that he returned to England with no other treasure than a few merry poems and humorous essays, and returned to his student’s place in Christ Church.”—Enc. Brit. He was assisted by Bolingbroke; but when his patronage failed, Swift procured him the situation of editor to “Barber’s Gazette.” He ultimately took to drinking; Lintot the bookseller, told Pope, “I remember Dr. King could write verses in a tavern three hours after he could not speak.” His last patron was Lord Clarendon, and he died in apartments he had provided for him in London, Dec. 25, 1712, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey at the expense of his lordship.—Ed.

Sloane describes Clark, the famous posture-master, “Phil. Trans.” No. 242, certainly with the wildest grammar, but with many curious particulars; the gentleman in one of Dr. King’s Dialogues inquires the secretary’s opinion of the causes of this man’s wonderful pliability of limbs; a question which Sloane had thus solved, with colloquial ease: it depended upon “bringing the body to it, by using himself to it.”

In giving an account of “a child born without a brain”—“Had it lived long enough,” said King, “it would have made an excellent publisher of Philosophical Transactions!”

Sloane presented the Royal Society with “a figure of a Chinese, representing one of that nation using an ear-picker, and expressing great satisfaction therein.”—“Whatever pleasure,” said that learned physician, “the Chinese may take in thus picking their ears, I am certain most people in these parts, who have had their hearing impaired, have had such misfortune first come to them by picking their ears too much.”—He is so curious, says King, that the secretary took as much satisfaction in looking upon the ear-picker, as the Chinese could do in picking their ears!

But “What drowning is”—that “Hanging is only apoplexy!” that “Men cannot swallow when they are dead!” that “No fish die of fevers!” that “Hogs s—t soap, and cows s—t fire!” that the secretary had “Shells, called Blackmoor’s-teeth, I suppose from their whiteness!” and the learned Ray’s, that grave naturalist, incredible description of “a very curious little instrument!” I leave to the reader and Dr. King.

Sir Hans Sloane was unhappily not insensible to these ludicrous assaults, and in the preface to his “History of Jamaica,” 1707, a work so highly prized for its botanical researches, absolutely anticipated this fatal facetiousness, for thus he delivers himself:—“Those who strive to make ridiculous anything of this kind, and think themselves great wits, but are very ignorant, and understand nothing of the argument, these, if one were afraid of them, and consulted his own ease, might possibly hinder the publication of any such work, the efforts to be expected from them, making possibly some impression upon persons of equal dispositions; but considering that I have the approbation of others, whose judgment, knowledge, &c., I have great reason to value; and considering that these sorts of men have been in all ages ready to do the like, not only to ordinary persons and their equals, but even to abuse their prince and blaspheme their Maker, I shall, as I have ever since I seriously considered this matter, think of and treat them with the greatest contempt.”

Dr. King’s dispersed works have fortunately been collected by Mr. Nichols, with ample illustrations, in three vols. 8vo, 1776. The “Useful Transactions in Philosophy and other sorts of Learning,” form a collection of ludicrous dissertations of Antiquarianism, Natural Philosophy, Criticism, &c., where his own peculiar humour combines with his curious reading. [In this he burlesqued the proceedings of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies with some degree of spirit and humour. By turning vulgar lines into Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon, a learned air is given to some papers on childish subjects. One learned doctor communicates to another “an Essay proving, by arguments philosophical, that millers, falsely so reputed, are not thieves, with an interesting argument that taylors likewise are not so.” A Welsh schoolmaster sends some “natural observations” made in Wales, in direct imitation of the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1707, and with humorous love for genealogy, reckons that in his school, “since the flood, there have been 466, and I am the 467th master: before the flood, they living long, there were but two—Rice ap Evan Dha the good, and Davie ap Shones Gonnah the naught, in whose time the flood came.” The first paper of the collection is an evident jest on John Bagford and his gatherings for the history of printing, now preserved among the manuscripts of the British Museum. It purports to be “an Essay on the invention of samplers, communicated by Mrs. Judith Bagford, with an account of her collections for the same:” and written in burlesque of a paper in the “Philosophical Transactions” for April, 1697. It is a most elaborate performance, deducing with mock-seriousness the origin of samplers from the ancient tales of Arachne, who “set forth the whole story of her wrongs in needlework, and sent it to her sister;” and our author adds, with much humour, “it is very remarkable that the memory of this story does at present continue, for there are no samplers, which proceed in any measure beyond the first rudiments, but have a tree and a nightingale sitting on it.” Such were the jests of the day against the Royal philosophers.] He also invented satirical and humorous indexes, not the least facetious parts of his volumes. King had made notes on more than 20,000 books and MSS., and his Adversaria, of which a portion has been preserved, is not inferior in curiosity to the literary journals of Gibbon, though it wants the investigating spirit of the modern philosopher.

The moral and literary character of Henley has been developed in “Calamities of Authors.”

The twenty-six folios of his “Vegetable System,” with many others, testify his love and his labour. It contains 1600 plates, representing 26,000 different figures of plants from nature only. This publication ruined the author, whose widow (the sister of Lord Ranelagh) published “An Address to the Public, by the Hon. Lady Hill, setting forth the consequences of the late Sir John Hill’s acquaintance with the Earl of Bute,” 1787. I should have noticed it in the “Calamities of Authors.” It offers a sad and mortifying lesson to the votary of science who aspires to a noble enterprise. Lady Hill complains of the patron; but a patron, however great, cannot always raise the public taste to the degree required to afford the only true patronage which can animate and reward an author. Her detail is impressive:—

“Sir John Hill had just wrote a book of great elegance—I think it was called ‘Exotic Botany’—which he wished to have presented to the king, and therefore named it to Lord Bute. His lordship waived that, saying that ‘he had a greater object to propose;’ and shortly after laid before him a plan of the most voluminous, magnificent, and costly work that ever man attempted. I tremble when I name its title—because I think the severe application which it required killed him; and I am sure the expense ruined his fortune—‘The Vegetable System.’ This work was to consist of twenty-six volumes folio, containing sixteen hundred copper-plates, the engraving of each cost four guineas; the paper was of the most expensive kind; the drawings by the first hands. The printing was also a very weighty concern; and many other articles, with which I am unacquainted. Lord Bute said that ‘the expense had been considered, and that Sir John Hill might rest assured his circumstances should not be injured.’ Thus he entered upon and finished his destruction. The sale bore no proportion to the expense. After ‘The Vegetable System’ was completed, Lord Bute proposed another volume to be added, which Sir John strenuously opposed; but his lordship repeating his desire, Sir John complied, lest his lordship should find a pretext to cast aside repeated promises of ample provision for himself and family. But this was the crisis of his fate—he died.” Lady Hill adds:—“He was a character on which every virtue was impressed.” The domestic partiality of the widow cannot alter the truth of the narrative of “The Vegetable System,” and its twenty-six tomes.

His apologist forms this excuse for one then affecting to be a student and a rake:—“Though engaged in works which required the attention of a whole life, he was so exact an economist of his time that he scarcely ever missed a public amusement for many years; and this, as he somewhere observes, was of no small service to him; as, without indulging in these respects, he could not have undergone the fatigue and study inseparable from the execution of his vast designs.”—Short Account of the “Life, Writings, and Character of the late Sir John Hill, M.D.” Edinburgh: 1779.

Hogarth has painted a portrait of Folkes, which is still hanging in the rooms of the Royal Society. He was nominated vice-president by the great Sir Isaac Newton, and succeeded him as president. He wrote a work on the “English Silver Coinage,” and died at the age of sixty-four, 1754.—Ed.

Hill planned his Review with good sense. He says:—“If I am merry in some places, it ought to be considered that the subjects are too ridiculous for serious criticism. That the work, however, might not be without its real use, an Error is nowhere exposed without establishing a Truth in its place.” He has incidentally thrown out much curious knowledge—such as his plan for forming a Hortus Siccus, &c. The Review itself may still be considered both as curious and entertaining.

In exposing their deficiencies, as well as their redundancies, Hill only wishes, as he tells us, that the Society may by this means become ashamed of what it has been, and that the world may know that he is NOT a member of it till it is an honour to a man to be so! This was telling the world, with some ingenuity, and with no little impudence, that the Royal Society would not admit him as a member. He pretends to give a secret anecdote to explain the cause of this rejection. Hill, in every critical conjuncture of his affairs, and they were frequent ones, had always a story to tell, or an evasion, which served its momentary purpose. When caned by an Irish gentleman at Ranelagh, and his personal courage, rather than his stoicism, was suspected, he published a story of his having once caned a person whom he called Mario; on which a wag, considering Hill as a Prometheus, wrote—

We shall see the story he turned to his purpose, when pressed hard by Fielding. In the present instance, in a letter to a foreign correspondent, who had observed his name on the list of the Correspondents of the Royal Society, Hill said—“You are to know that I have the honour NOT to be a member of the Royal Society of London.”—This letter lay open on his table when a member, upon his accustomed visit, came in, and in his absence read it. “And we are not to wonder,” says Hill, “that he who could obtain intelligence in this manner could also divulge it. Hinc illÆ lachrymÆ! Hence all the animosities that have since disturbed this philosophic world.” While Hill insolently congratulates himself that he is not a member of the Royal Society, he has most evidently shown that he had no objection to be the member of any society which would enrol his name among them. He obtained his medical degree from no honourable source; and another title, which he affected, he mysteriously contracted into barbaric dissonance. Hill entitled himself—

To which Smart, in the “Hilliad,” alludes—

His personal attacks on Martin Folkes, the president, are caustic, but they may not be true; and on Baker, celebrated for his microscopical discoveries, are keen. He reproaches Folkes, in his severe dedication of the work, in all the dignity of solemn invective.—“The manner in which you represented me to a noble friend, while to myself you made me much more than I deserved; the ease with which you had excused yourself, and the solemnity with which, in the face of Almighty God, you excused yourself again; when we remember that the whole was done within the compass of a day; these are surely virtues in a patron that I, of all men, ought not to pass over in silence.” Baker, in his early days, had unluckily published a volume of lusory poems. Some imitations of Prior’s loose tales Hill makes use of to illustrate his “Philosophical Transactions.” All is food for the malicious digestion of Wit!

His anecdote of Mr. Baker’s Louse is a piece of secret scientific history sufficiently ludicrous.

“The Duke of Montague was famous for his love to the whole animal creation, and for his being able to keep a very grave face when not in the most serious earnest. Mr. Baker, a distinguished member of the Royal Society, had one day entertained this nobleman and several other persons with the sight of the peristaltic motion of the bowels in a louse, by the microscope. When the observation was over, he was going to throw the creature away; but the Duke, with a face that made him believe he was perfectly in earnest, told him it would be not only cruel, but ungrateful, in return for the entertainment that creature had given them, to destroy it. He ordered the boy to be brought in from whom it was procured, and after praising the smallness and delicacy of Mr. Baker’s fingers, persuaded him carefully to replace the animal in its former territories, and to give the boy a shilling not to disturb it for a fortnight.”—“A Review of the Works of the Royal Society,” by John Hill, M.D., p. 5.

These papers had appeared in the London Daily Advertiser, 1754. At their close he gleaned the best, and has preserved them in two volumes. But as Hill will never rank as a classic, the original nonsense will be considered as most proper for the purposes of a true collector. Woodward, the comedian, in his lively attack on Hill, has given “a mock Inspector,” an exquisite piece of literary ridicule, in which he has hit off the egotisms and slovenly ease of the real ones. Never, like “The Inspector,” flamed such a provoking prodigy in the cloudy skies of Grub-street; and Hill seems studiously to have mortified his luckless rivals by a perpetual embroidery of his adventures in the “Walks at Marybone,” the “Rotunda at Ranelagh,” spangled over with “my domestics,” and “my equipage.” [One of his adventures at Ranelagh was sufficiently unfortunate to obtain for him the unenviable notoriety of a caricature print representing him enduring a castigation at the Rotunda gate from an Irish gentleman named Brown, with whose character he had made far too free in one of his “Inspectors.” Hill showed much pusillanimity in the affair, took to his bed, and gave out that the whole thing was a conspiracy to murder him. This occasioned the publication of another print, in which he is represented in bed, surrounded by medical men, who treat him with very little respect. One insists on his fee, because Hill has never been acknowledged as one of themselves; and another, to his plea of want of money, responds, “Sell your sword, it is only an encumbrance.”]

It is useful to remind the public that they are often played upon in this manner by the artifices of political writers. We have observed symptoms of this deception practised at present. It is an old trick of the craft, and was greatly used at a time when the nation seemed maddened with political factions. In a pamphlet of “A View of London and Westminster, or the Town-spy,” 1725, I find this account:—“The seeming quarrel, formerly, between Mist’s Journal and the Flying Post was secretly concerted between themselves, in order to decoy the eyes of all the parties on both their papers; and the project succeeded beyond all expectation; for I have been told that the former narrowly missed getting an estate by it.”—p. 32.

Isaac Reed, in his “Repository of Fugitive Pieces of Wit and Humour,” vol. iv., in republishing “The Hilliad,” has judiciously preserved the offending “Impertinent” and the abjuring “Inspector.” The style of “The Impertinent” is volatile and poignant. His four classes of authors are not without humour. “There are men who write because they have wit; there are those who write because they are hungry; there are some of the modern authors who have a constant fund of both these causes; and there are who will write, although they are not instigated either by the one or by the other. The first are all spirit; the second are all earth; the third disclose more life, or more vapidity, as the one or the other cause prevails; and for the last, having neither the one nor the other principle for the cause, they show neither the one nor the other character in the effect; but begin, continue, and end, as if they had neither begun, continued, nor ended at all.” The first class he instances by Fielding; the second by Smart. Of the third he says:—“The mingled wreath belongs to Hill,” that is himself; and the fourth he illustrates by the absurd Sir William Browne.

“Those of the first rank are the most capricious and lazy of all animals. The monkey genius would rarely exert itself, if even idleness innate did not give way to the superior love of mischief. The ass (that is Smart), which characters the second, is as laborious as he is empty; he wears a ridiculous comicalness of aspect (which was, indeed, the physiognomy of the poor poet), that makes people smile when they see him at a distance. His mouth opens, because he must be fed, while we laugh at the insensibility and obstinacy that make him prick his lips with thistles.”

Woodward humorously attributes Hill’s attack on him to his jealousy of his successful performance of Harlequin, and opens some of the secret history of Hill, by which it appears that early in life he trod the theatrical boards. He tells us of the extraordinary pains the prompter had taken with Hill, in the part of Oroonoko; though, “if he had not quite forgotten it, to very little purpose.” He reminds Hill of a dramatic anecdote, which he no doubt had forgotten. It seems he once belonged to a strolling company at May-fair, where, in the scene between Altamont and Lothario, the polite audience of that place all chorused, and agreed with him, when dying he exclaimed, “Oh, Altamont, thy genius is the stronger.” He then shows him off as the starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, in one of his botanic peregrinations to Chelsea Garden; from whence, it is said, he was expelled for “culling too many rare plants”—

Hill, who was often so brisk in his attack on the wits, had no power of retort; so that he was always buffeting and always buffeted.

Hill addresses the Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Speaker, on Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection of Natural History, proposing himself as a candidate for nomination in the principal office, by whatever name that shall be called:—“I deliver myself with humility; but conscious also that I possess the liberties of a British subject, I shall speak with freedom.” He says that the only means left for a Briton is to address his sovereign and the public. “That foreigners will resort to this collection is certain, for it is the most considerable in the world; and that our own people will often visit it is as sure, because it may be made the means of much useful as well as curious knowledge. One and the other will expect a person in that office who has sufficient knowledge: he must be able to give account of every article, freely and fluently, not only in his own, but in the Latin and French languages.

“This the world, and none in it better than your lordship, sees is not a place that any one can execute: it requires knowledge in a peculiar and uncommon kind of study—knowledge which very few possess; and in which, my lord, the bitterest of my enemies (and I have thousands, although neither myself nor they know why) will not say I am deficient——.

“My lord, the eyes of all Europe are upon this transaction. What title I have to your lordship’s favour, those books which I have published, and with which (pardon the necessary boast) all Europe is acquainted, declare. Many may dispute by interest with me; but if there be one who would prefer himself, by his abilities, I beg the matter may be brought to trial. The collection is at hand; and I request, my lord, such person and myself may be examined by that test, together. It is an amazing store of knowledge; and he has most, in this way, who shall show himself most acquainted with it.

“What are my own abilities it very ill becomes me thus to boast; but did they not qualify me for the trust, my lord, I would not ask it. As to those of any other, unless a man be conjured from the dead, I shall not fear to say there is not any one whoever that is able so much as to call the parts of the collection by their names.

“I know I shall be accused of ostentation in giving to myself this preference; and I am sorry for it: but those who have candour will know it could not be avoided.

“Many excel, my lord, in other studies: it is my chance to have bestowed the labour of my life on this: those labours may be of some use to others. This appears the only instance in which it is possible that they should be rewarded——.”

In a subsequent Inspector, he treated on the improvement of botany by raising plants, and reading lectures on them at the British Museum, with the living plants before the lecturer and his auditors. Poor Sir John! he was born half a century too early!—He would, in this day, have made his lectures fashionable; and might have secured at the opera every night an elegant audience for the next morning in the gardens of the Museum.

It would be difficult to form a list of his anonymous works or compilations, among which many are curious. Tradition has preserved his name as the writer of Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery, and of several novels. There is a very curious work, entitled “Travels in the East,” 2 vols. 8vo, of which the author has been frequently and in vain inquired after. These travels are attributed to a noble lord; but it now appears that they are a very entertaining narrative manufactured by Hill. Whiston, the bookseller, had placed this work in his MS. catalogue of Hill’s books.

There is still another production of considerable merit, entitled “Observations on the Greek and Roman Classics,” 1753. A learned friend recollects, when young, that this critical work was said to be written by Hill. It excels Blackwell and Fenton; and aspires to the numerous composition of prose. The sentimental critic enters into the feelings of the great authors whom he describes with spirit, delicacy of taste, and sometimes with beautiful illustration. It only wants a chastening hand to become a manual for the young classical student, by which he might acquire those vivid emotions, which many college tutors may not be capable of communicating.

I suspect, too, he is the author of this work, from a passage which Smart quotes, as a specimen of Hill’s puffing himself, and of those smart short periods which look like wit, without being witty. In a letter to himself, as we are told, Hill writes:—“You have discovered many of the beauties of the ancients—they are obliged to you; we are obliged to you: were they alive, they would thank you; we who are alive do thank you.” If Hill could discriminate the most hidden beauties of the ancients, the tact must have been formed at his leisure—in his busy hours he never copied them; but when had he leisure?

Two other works, of the most contrasted character, display the versatility and dispositions of this singular genius, at different eras. When “The Inspector” was rolling in his chariot about the town, appeared “Letters from the Inspector to a Lady,” 1752. It is a pamphlet, containing the amorous correspondence of Hill with a reigning beauty, whom he first saw at Ranelagh. On his first ardent professions he is contemptuously rejected; he perseveres in high passion, and is coldly encouraged; at length he triumphs; and this proud and sullen beauty, in her turn, presents a horrid picture of the passions. Hill then becomes the reverse of what he was; weary of her jealousy, sated with the intercourse, he studiously avoids, and at length rejects her; assigning for his final argument his approaching marriage. The work may produce a moral effect, while it exhibits a striking picture of all the misery of illicit connexions: but the scenes are coloured with Ovidian warmth. The original letters were shown at the bookseller’s: Hill’s were in his own handwriting, and the lady’s in a female hand. But whether Hill was the publisher, as an attempt at notoriety—or the lady admired her own correspondence, which is often exquisitely wrought, is not known.

Hill, in his serious hours, published a large quarto volume, entitled “Thoughts Concerning God and Nature,” 1755. This work, the result of his scientific knowledge and his moral reasoning, was never undertaken for the purpose of profit. He printed it with the certainty of a considerable loss, from its abstract topics, not obvious to general readers; at a time, too, when a guinea quarto was a very hazardous enterprise. He published it purely from conscientious and religious motives; a circumstance mentioned in that Apology of his Life which we have noticed. The more closely the character of Hill is scrutinised, the more extraordinary appears this man, so often justly contemned, and so often unjustly depreciated.

Through the influence of Lord Bute he became connected with the Royal Gardens at Kew; and his lordship also assisted him in publishing his botanical works. See note, p. 363.

It would occupy pages to transcribe epigrams on Hill. One of them alludes to his philosophical as well as his literary character:—

Garrick’s happy lines are well known on his farces:—

Another said—

The rejoinder would reverse the wish—

Hill says, in his pamphlet on the “Virtues of British Herbs”:—“It will be happy if, by the same means, the knowledge of plants also becomes more general. The study of them is pleasant, and the exercise of it healthful. He who seeks the herb for its cure, will find it half effected by the walk; and when he is acquainted with the useful kinds, he may be more people’s, besides his own, physician.”

Haughtiness was the marking feature of Bentley’s literary character; and his Wolseyan style and air have been played on by the wits. Bentley happened to express himself on the King’s MS. of Phalaris in a manner their witty malice turned against him. “’Twas a surprise (he said) to find that OUR MS. was not perused.”—“Our MS. (they proceed) that is, his Majesty’s and mine! He speaks out now; ’tis no longer the King’s, but OUR MS., i.e. Dr. Bentley’s and the King’s in common, Ego et Rex meus—much too familiar for a library-keeper!”—It has been said that Bentley used the same Wolseyan egotism on Pope’s publications:—“This man is always abusing me or the King!”

Bentley, in one place, having to give a positive contradiction to the statement of the bookseller, rising in all his dignity and energy, exclaims, “What can be done in this case? Here are two contrary affirmations; and the matter being done in private, neither of us have any witness. I might plead, as Æmilius Scaurus did against one Varius, of Sucro. Varius Sucronensis ait, Æmilius Scaurus negat. Utri creditis Quirites?” p. 21.—The story is told by Valerius Maximus, lib. iii. c. 7. Scaurus was insolently accused by one Varius, a Sucronian, that he had taken bribes from Mithridates: Scaurus addressed the Roman people. “He did not think it just that a man of his age should defend himself against accusations, and before those who were not born when he filled the offices of the republic, nor witnessed the actions he had performed. Varius, the Sucronian, says that Scaurus, corrupted by gold, would have betrayed the republic; Scaurus replies, It is not true. Whom will you believe, fellow-Romans?”—This appeal to the people produced all the effect imaginable, and the ridiculous accuser was silenced.

Bentley points the same application, with even more self-consciousness of his worth, in another part of his preface. It became necessary to praise himself, to remove the odium Boyle and his friends had raised on him—it was a difficulty overcome. “I will once more borrow the form of argument that Æmilius Scaurus used against Varius Sucronensis. Mr. Spanheim and Mr. GrÆvius give a high character of Dr. B.’s learning: Mr. Boyle gives the meanest that malice can furnish himself with. Utri creditis, Quirites? Whether of the characters will the present age or posterity believe?”—p. 82. It was only a truly great mind which could bring itself so close to posterity.

It was the fashion then to appear very unconcerned about one’s literary reputation; but then to be so tenacious about it when once obtained as not to suffer, with common patience, even the little finger of criticism to touch it. Boyle, after defending what he calls his “honesty,” adds, “the rest only touches my learning. This will give me no concern, though it may put me to some little trouble. I shall enter upon this with the indifference of a gamester who plays but for a trifle.” On this affected indifference, Bentley keenly observes:—“This was entering on his work a little ominously; for a gamester who plays with indifference never plays his game well. Besides that, by this odd comparison, he seems to give warning, and is as good as his word, that he will put the dice upon his readers as often as he can. But what is worse than all, this comparison puts one in mind of a general rumour, that there’s another set of gamesters who play him in his dispute while themselves are safe behind the curtain.”—Bentley’s Dissertation on Phalaris, p. 2.

Rumours and conjectures are the lot of contemporaries; truth seems reserved only for posterity; and, like the fabled Minerva, she is born of age at once. The secret history of this volume, which partially appeared, has been more particularly opened in one of Warburton’s letters, who received it from Pope, who had been “let into the secret.” Boyle wrote the Narrative, “which, too, was corrected for him.” Freind, who wrote the entire Dissertation on Æsop in that volume, wrote also, with Atterbury, the body of the Criticisms; King, the droll argument, proving that Bentley was not the author of his own Dissertation, and the extraordinary index which I shall shortly notice. In Atterbury’s “Epistolary Correspondence” is a letter, where, with equal anger and dignity, Atterbury avows his having written about half, and planned the whole of Boyle’s attack upon Bentley! With these facts before us, can we read without surprise, if not without indignation, the passage I shall now quote from the book to which the name of Boyle is prefixed. In raising an artful charge against Bentley, of appropriating to himself some MS. notes of Sir Edward Sherburn, Boyle, replying to the argument of Bentley, that “Phalaris” was the work of some sophist, says:—“The sophists are everywhere pelted by Dr. Bentley, for putting out what they wrote in other men’s names; but I did not expect to hear so loudly of it from one that has so far outdone them; for I think ’tis much worse to take the honour of another man’s book to one’s self, than to entitle one’s own book to another man.”—p. 16.

I am surprised Bentley did not turn the point of his antagonist’s sword on himself, for this flourish was a most unguarded one. But Bentley could not then know so much of the book, “made up by contributions,” as ourselves.

Partial truths flew about in rumours at the time; but the friends of a young nobleman, and even his fellow-workmen, seemed concerned that his glory should not be diminished by a ruinous division. Rymer, in his “Essay concerning Curious and Critical Learning,” judiciously surmised its true origin. “I fancy this book was written (as most public compositions in that college are) by a select club. Every one seems to have thrown in a repartee or so in his turn; and the most ingenious Dr. Aldrich (he does not deserve the epithet in its most friendly sense) no doubt at their head, smoked and punned plentifully on this occasion.” The arrogance of Aldrich exceeded even that of Bentley. Rymer tells further, that Aldrich was notorious for thus employing his “young inexperienced students;” that he “betrayed Mr. Boyle into the controversy, and is still involving others in the quarrel.” Thus he points at the rival chieftains; one of whom never appeared in public, but was the great mover behind the curtain. These lively wits, so deeply busied among the obscurest writers of antiquity, so much against their will, making up a show of learning against the formidable array of Bentley, exhilarated themselves in their dusty labours by a perpetual stimulus of keen humour, playful wit, and angry invective. No doubt they were often enraged at bearing the yoke about their luxuriant manes, ploughing the darkest and heaviest soil of antiquity. They had been reared—

Swift, in “The Battle of the Books,” who, under his patron, Sir William Temple, was naturally in alliance with “the Bees,” with ingenious ambiguity alludes to the glorious manufacture. “Boyle, clad in a suit of armour, which had been given him by all the Gods.” Still the truth was only floating in rumours and surmises; and the little that Boyle had done was not yet known. Lord Orrery, his son, had a difficulty to overcome to pass lightly over this allusion. The literary honour of the family was at stake, and his filial piety was exemplary to a father, who had unfortunately, in passion, deprived his lordship of the family library—a stroke from which his sensibility never recovered, and which his enemies ungenerously pointed against him. Lord Orrery, with all the tenderness of a son, and the caution of a politician, observes on “the armour given by the Gods”—“I shall not dispute about the gift of the armour. The Gods never bestowed celestial armour except upon heroes, whose courage and superior strength distinguished them from the rest of mankind.” Most ingeniously he would seem to convert into a classical fable what was designed as a plain matter of fact!

It does credit to the discernment of Bentley, whose taste was not very lively in English composition, that he pronounced Boyle was not the author of the “Examination,” from the variety of styles in it.—p. 107.

This short and pointed satire of Horace is merely a pleasant story about a low wretch of the name of King; and Brutus, under whose command he was, is entreated to get rid of him, from his hereditary hatred to all kings. I suppose this pun must be considered legitimate, otherwise Horace was an indifferent punster.

A keen repartee! Yet King could read this mighty volume as “a vain confused performance,” but the learned Dodwell declared to “the Bees of Christchurch,” who looked up to him, that “he had never learned so much from any book of the size in his life.” King was as unjust to Bentley, as Bentley to King. Men of genius are more subject to “unnatural civil war” than even the blockheads whom Pope sarcastically reproaches with it. The great critic’s own notion of his volume seems equally modest and just. “To undervalue this dispute about ‘Phalaris,’ because it does not suit one’s own studies, is to quarrel with a circle because it is not a square. If the question be not of vulgar use, it was writ therefore for a few; for even the greatest performances, upon the most important subjects, are no entertainment at all to the many of the world.”—p. 107.

This index, a very original morsel of literary pleasantry, is at once a satirical character of the great critic, and what it professes to be. I preserve a specimen among the curiosities I am collecting. It is entitled—

“A Short Account of Dr. Bentley, by way of Index.

“Dr. Bentley’s true story proved false, by the testimonies of, &c., p. —
“His civil language, p. —
“His nice taste,
in wit, p. —
in style, p. —
in Greek, p. —
in Latin, p. —
in English, p. —
“His modesty and decency in contradicting great men”—a very long list of authors, concluding with ‘Everybody,’ p. —
“His familiar acquaintance with books he never saw,” p. —
And lastly, “his profound skill in criticism—from beginning to The End.”

Which thus terminates the volume.

Cicero ad Atticum, Lib. vii., Epist. xii.

No doubt this idea was the origin of that satirical Capriccio, which closed in a most fortunate pun—a literary caricature, where the doctor is represented in the hands of Phalaris’s attendants, who are putting him into the tyrant’s bull, while Bentley exclaims, “I had rather be roasted than Boyled.”

Sir Richard Blackmore, in his bold attempt at writing “A Satire against Wit,” in utter defiance of it, without any, however, conveys some opinions of the times. He there paints the great critic, “crowned with applause,” seated amidst “the spoils of ruined wits:”

Boyle, not satisfied with the undeserved celebrity conceded to his volume, ventured to write poetry, in which no one appears to have suspected the aid of “The Bees”—

Randolph’s Muses’ Looking-glass. Act 1, Scene 4.

Swift certainly admired, if he did not imitate Marvell: for in his “Tale of a Tub” he says, “We still read Marvell’s answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book it answers be sunk long ago.”

This is a curious remark of Wood’s: How came raillery and satire to be considered as “a newly-refined art?” Has it not, at all periods, been prevalent among every literary people? The remark is, however, more founded on truth than it appears, and arose from Wood’s own feelings. Wit and Raillery had been so strange to us during the gloomy period of the fanatic Commonwealth, that honest Anthony, whose prejudices did not run in favour of Marvell, not only considers him as the “restorer of this newly-refined art,” but as one “hugely versed in it,” and acknowledges all its efficacy in the complete discomfiture of his haughty rival. Besides this, a small book of controversy, such as Marvell’s usually are, was another novelty—the “aureoli libelli,” as one fondly calls his precious books, were in the wretched taste of the times, rhapsodies in folio. The reader has doubtless heard of Caryll’s endless “Commentary on Job,” consisting of 2400 folio pages! in small type. Of that monument of human perseverance, which commenting on Job’s patience, inspired what few works do to whoever read them, the exercise of the virtue it inculcated, the publisher, in his advertisement in Clavel’s Catalogue of Books, 1681, announces the two folios in 600 sheets each! these were a republication of the first edition, in twelve volumes quarto! he apologises “that it hath been so long a doing, to the great vexation and loss of the proposer.” He adds, “indeed, some few lines, no more than what may be contained in a quarto page, are expunged, they not relating to the Exposition, which nevertheless some, by malicious prejudice, have so unjustly aggravated, as if the whole work had been disordered.” He apologises for curtailing a few lines from 2400 folio pages! and he considered that these few lines were the only ones that did not relate to the Exposition! At such a time, the little books of Marvell must have been considered as relishing morsels after such indigestible surfeits.

The severity of his satire on Charles’s court may be well understood by the following lines:—

“The Historical Poem,” given in the poems on State affairs, is so personal in its attacks on the vices of Charles, that it is marvellous how its author escaped punishment. “Hodge’s Vision from the Monument” is equally strong, while the “Dialogue between two Horses” (that of the statue of Charles I. at Charing-cross, and Charles II., then in the city), has these two strong lines of regret:—

The satire ends with the question:—

Which is thus answered:—

So Burnet tells us.

See “The Rehearsal Transprosed, the second part,” p. 76.

One of the canting terms used by the saints of those days, and not obsolete in the dialect of those who still give themselves out to be saints in the present.

Marvell admirably describes Parker’s journey to London at the Restoration, where “he spent a considerable time in creeping into all corners and companies, horoscoping up and down concerning the duration of the government.” This term, so expressive of his political doubts, is from “Judicial Astrology,” then a prevalent study. “Not considering anything as best, but as most lasting and most profitable; and after having many times cast a figure, he at last satisfied himself that the episcopal government would endure as long as this king lived, and from thenceforwards cast about to find the highway to preferment. To do this, he daily enlarged not only his conversation but his conscience, and was made free of some of the town vices; imagining, like Muleasses, King of Tunis (for I take witness that on all occasions I treat him rather above his quality than otherwise), that by hiding himself among the onions he should escape being traced by his perfumes.” The narrative proceeds with a curious detail of all his sycophantic attempts at seducing useful patrons, among whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then began “those pernicious books,” says Marvell, “in which he first makes all that he will to be law, and then whatsoever is law, to be divinity.” Parker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” came at length to promulgate such violent principles as these, “He openly declares his submission to the government of a Nero and a Caligula, rather than suffer a dissolution of it.” He says, “it is absolutely necessary to set up a more severe government over men’s consciences and religious persuasions than over their vices and immoralities;” and that “men’s vices and debaucheries may lie more safely indulged than their consciences.” Is it not difficult to imagine that this man had once been an Independent, the advocate for every congregation being independent of a bishop or a synod?

Parker’s father was a lawyer, and one of Oliver’s most submissive sub-committee men, who so long pillaged the nation and spilled its blood, “not in the hot and military way (which diminishes always the offence), but in the cooler blood and sedentary execution of an high court of justice.” He wrote a very remarkable book (after he had been petitioned against for a misdemeanour) in defence of that usurped irregular state called “The Government of the People of England.” It had “a most hieroglyphical title” of several emblems: two hands joined, and beneath a sheaf of arrows, stuffed about with half-a-dozen mottoes, “enough,” says Marvell, “to have supplied the mantlings and achievement of this (godly) family.” An anecdote in this secret history of Parker is probably true. “He shortly afterwards did inveigh against his father’s memory, and in his mother’s presence, before witnesses, for a couple of whining fanatics.”—Rehearsal Transprosed, second part, p. 75.

This preface was prefixed to Bishop Bramball’s “Vindication of the Bishops from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery.”

As a specimen of what old Anthony calls “a jerking flirting way of writing,” I transcribe the titles of these answers which Marvell received. As Marvell had nicknamed Parker, Bayes, the quaint humour of one entitled his reply, “Rosemary and Bayes;” another, “The Transproser Rehearsed, or the Fifth Act of Mr. Bayes’s Play;” another, “Gregory Father Greybeard, with his Vizard off;” another formed “a Commonplace Book out of the Rehearsal, digested under heads;” and lastly, “Stoo him Bayes, or some Animadversions on the Humour of writing Rehearsals.”—Biog. Brit. p. 3055.

This was the very Bartlemy-fair of wit!

The title will convey some notion of its intolerant principles: “A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, wherein the authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects, in matters of external Religion, is asserted.”

Milton had become acquainted with Marvell when travelling in Italy, where he had gone to perfect his studies. He returned to England in 1653, and was connected with the Cromwellian party, through the introduction of Milton, in 1657. The great poet was at that time secretary to Cromwell, and he became his assistant-secretary. He afterwards represented his native town of Hull in Parliament.—Ed.

Vanus, pannosus, et famelicus poetaster oenopolis quovis vapulans, fuste et calce indies petulantiÆ poenas tulit—are the words in Parker’s “De Rebus sui Temporis Commentariorum,” p. 275.

D’Avenant commenced his poem during his exile at Paris. The preface is dated from the Louvre; the postscript from Cowes Castle, in the Isle of Wight, where he was then confined, expecting his immediate execution. The poem, in the first edition, 1651, is therefore abruptly concluded. There is something very affecting and great in his style on this occasion. “I am here arrived at the middle of the third book. But it is high time to strike sail and cast anchor, though I have run but half my course, when at the helm I am threatened with death; who, though he can visit us but once, seems troublesome; and even in the innocent may beget such a gravity, as diverts the music of verse. Even in a worthy design, I shall ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted by so great an experiment as dying;—and ’tis an experiment to the most experienced; for no man (though his mortifications may be much greater than mine) can say he has already died.”—D’Avenant is said to have written a letter to Hobbes about this time, giving some account of his progress in the third book. “But why (said he) should I trouble you or myself with these thoughts, when I am pretty certain I shall be hanged next week?”—A stroke of the gaiety of temper of a very thoughtful mind; for D’Avenant, with all his wit and fancy, has made the profoundest reflections on human life.

The reader may be interested to know, that after D’Avenant’s removal from Cowes to the Tower, to be tried, his life was saved by the gratitude of two aldermen of York, whom he had obliged. It is delightful to believe the story told by Bishop Newton, that D’Avenant owed his life to Milton; Wood, indeed, attributes our poet’s escape to both; at the Restoration D’Avenant interposed, and saved Milton. Poets, after all, envious as they are to a brother, are the most generously-tempered of men: they libel, but they never hang; they will indeed throw out a sarcasm on the man whom they saved from being hanged. “Please your Majesty,” said Sir John Denham, “do not hang George Withers—that it may not be said I am the worst poet alive.”

It would form a very curious piece of comparative criticism, were the opinions and the arguments of all the critics—those of the time and of the present day—thrown into the smelting-pot. The massiness of some opinions of great authority would be reduced to a thread of wire; and even what is accepted as standard ore might shrink into “a gilt sixpence.” On one side, the condemners of D’Avenant would be Rymer, Blackwall, Granger, Knox, Hurd, and Hayley; and the advocates would be Hobbes, Waller, Cowley, Dr. Aikin, Headley, &c. Rymer opened his Aristotelian text-book. He discovers that the poet’s first lines do not give any light into his design (it is probable D’Avenant would have found it hard to have told it to Mr. Rymer); that it has neither proposition nor invocation—(Rymer might have filled these up himself); so that “he chooses to enter into the top of the house, because the mortals of mean and satisfied minds go in at the door;” and then “he has no hero or action so illustrious that the name of the poem prepared the reader for its reception.” D’Avenant had rejected the marvellous from his poem—that is, the machinery of the epic: he had resolved to compose a tale of human beings for men. “This was,” says Blackwall, another of the classical flock, “like lopping off a man’s limb, and then putting him upon running races.” Our formal critics are quite lively in their dulness on our “adventurer.” But poets, in the crisis of a poetical revolution, are more legitimate judges than all such critics. Waller and Cowley applaud D’Avenant for this very omission of the epical machinery in this new vein of invention:—

Hurd’s discussion on “Gondibert,” in his “Commentaries,” is the most important piece of criticism; subtle, ingenious, and exquisitely analytical. But he holds out the fetter of authority, and he decides as a judge who expounds laws; not the best decision, when new laws are required to abrogate obsolete ones. And what laws invented by man can be immutable? D’Avenant was thus tried by the laws of a country, that of Greece or Rome, of which, it is said, he was not even a denizen.

It is remarkable that all the critics who condemn D’Avenant could not but be struck by his excellences, and are very particular in expressing their admiration of his genius. I mean all the critics who have read the poem: some assuredly have criticised with little trouble.

It is written in the long four-lined stanzas, which Dryden adopted for his Annus Mirabilis; nearly 2000 of such stanzas are severe trials for the critical reader.—Ed.

I select some of these lines as examples.

Of Care, who only “seals her eyes in cloisters,” he says,

Of learned Curiosity, eager, but not to be hurried—the student is

He calls a library, with sublime energy,

Never has a politician conveyed with such force a most important precept:

Of the Court he says,

And these lines, taken as they occur:

I conclude with one complete stanza, of the same cast of reflection. It may be inscribed in the library of the student, in the studio of the artist, in every place where excellence can only be obtained by knowledge.

Can one read such passages as these without catching some of the sympathies of a great genius that knows itself?

“He who writes an heroic poem leaves an estate entailed, and he gives a greater gift to posterity than to the present age; for a public benefit is best measured in the number of receivers; and our contemporaries are but few when reckoned with those who shall succeed.

“If thou art a malicious reader, thou wilt remember my preface boldly confessed, that a main motive to the undertaking was a desire of fame; and thou mayest likewise say, I may very possibly not live to enjoy it. Truly, I have some years ago considered that Fame, like Time, only gets a reverence by long running; and that, like a river, ’tis narrowest where ’tis bred, and broadest afar off.

“If thou, reader, art one of those who have been warmed with poetic fire, I reverence thee as my judge; and whilst others tax me with vanity, I appeal to thy conscience whether it be more than such a necessary assurance as thou hast made to thyself in like undertakings? For when I observe that writers have many enemies, such inward assurance, methinks, resembles that forward confidence in men of arms, which makes them proceed in great enterprise; since the right examination of abilities begins with inquiring whether we doubt ourselves.”

Such a composition is injured by mutilation. He here also alludes to his military character: “Nor could I sit idle and sigh with such as mourn to hear the drum; for if the age be not quiet enough to be taught virtue a pleasant way, the next may be at leisure; nor could I (like men that have civilly slept till they are old in dark cities) think war a novelty.” Shakspeare could not have expressed his feelings, in his own style, more eloquently touching than D’Avenant.

It is said there were four writers. The Clinias and Dametas were probably Sir John Denham and Jo. Donne; Sir Allan Broderick and Will Crofts, who is mentioned by the clubs as one of their fellows, appear to be the Sancho and Jack Pudding. Will Crofts was a favourite with Charles II: he had been a skilful agent, as appears in Clarendon. [In the accounts of moneys disbursed for secret services in the reign of Charles II., published by the Camden Society, his name appears for 200l., but that of his wife repeatedly figures for large sums, “as of free guift.” In this way she receives 700l. with great regularity for a series of years, until the death of Charles II.] Howell has a poem “On some who, blending their brains together, plotted how to bespatter one of the Muses’ choicest sons, Sir William D’Avenant.”

The scene where the story of “Gondibert” is placed, which the wits sometimes pronounced Lumber and Lumbery.

“Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 158 (last edition).

There is a small poem, published in 1643, entitled “The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus,” in the manner of a later work, “The Sessions of the Poets,” in which all the Diurnals and Mercuries are arraigned and tried. An impartial satire on them all; and by its good sense and heavy versification, is so much in the manner of George Wither, that some have conjectured it to be that singular author’s. Its rarity gives it a kind of value. Of such verses as Wither’s, who has been of late extolled too highly, the chief merit is their sense and truth; which, if he were not tedious, might be an excellence in prose. Antiquaries, when they find a poet adapted for their purposes, conjecture that he is an excellent one. This prosing satirist, strange to say, in some pastoral poetry, has opened the right vein.

Aulicus is well characterized:—

Alluding to a ridiculous rumour, that the King was to receive foreign troops by a Danish fleet.

Col. Urrey, alias Hurrey, deserted the Parliament, and went over to the King; afterwards deserted the King, and discovered to the Parliament all he knew of the King’s forces.—See Clarendon.

This Sir William Brereton, or, as Clarendon writes the name, Bruerton, was the famous Cheshire knight, whom Cleveland characterizes as one of those heroes whose courage lies in their teeth. “Was Brereton,” says the loyal satirist, “to fight with his teeth, as he in all other things resembles the beast, he would have odds of any man at this weapon. He’s a terrible slaughterman at a Thanksgiving dinner. Had he been cannibal enough to have eaten those he vanquished, his gut would have made him valiant.” And in “Loyal Songs” his valiant appetite is noticed:

And Aulicus, we see, accuses him of concealing his bravery in a hayrick. It is always curious and useful to confer the writers of intemperate times one with another. Lord Clarendon, whose great mind was incapable of descending to scurrility, gives a very different character to this pot-valiant and hayrick runaway; for he says, “It cannot be denied but Sir William Brereton, and the other gentlemen of that party, albeit their educations and course of life had been very different from their present engagements, and for the most part very unpromising in matters of war, and therefore were too much contemned enemies, executed their commands with notable sobriety and indefatigable industry (virtues not so well practised in the King’s quarters), insomuch as the best soldiers who encountered with them had no cause to despise them.”—Clarendon, vol. ii. p. 147.

“The Scotch Dove” seems never to have recovered from this metamorphosis, but ever after, among the newsmen, was known to be only a Widgeon. His character is not very high in “The Great Assizes.”

The Scotch Dove desires to meet the classical Aulicus in the duel of the pen:—

“The Scotch Dove” is condemned “to cross the seas, or to repasse the Tweede.” They all envy him his “easy mulet,” but he wofully exclaims at the hard sentence,

This stroke alludes to a rumour of the times, noticed also by Clarendon, that Pym died of the morbus pediculosus.

“Peard, a bold lawyer of little note.”—Clarendon.

These divines were as ready with the sword as the pen; thus, we are told in “The Impartial Scout” for July, 1650—“The ministers are now as active in the military discipline as formerly they were in the gospel profession, Parson Ennis, Parson Brown, and about thirty other ministers having received commissions to be majors and captains, who now hold forth the Bible in one hand, and the sword in the other, telling the soldiery that they need not fear what man can do against them—that God is on their side—and that He hath prepared an engine in heaven to break and blast the designs of all covenant-breakers.”—Ed.

A forcible description of Locke may be found in the curious “Life of Wood,” written by himself. I shall give the passage where Wood acknowledges his after celebrity, at the very moment the bigotry of his feelings is attempting to degrade him.

Wood belonged to a club with Locke and others, for the purpose of hearing chemical lectures. “John Locke of Christchurch was afterwards a noted writer. This John Locke was a man of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented. The club wrote and took notes from the mouth of their master, who sat at the upper end of a table, but the said John Locke scorned to do it; so that while every man besides of the club were writing, he would be prating and troublesome.”

This anecdote deserves preservation. I have drawn it from the MSS. of Bishop Kennet.

“In the Epitaph on John Philips occurs this line on his metre, that

These lines were ordered to be razed out of the monument by Dr. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester. The word Miltono being, as he said, not fit to be in a Christian church; but they have since been restored by Dr. Atterbury, who succeeded him as Bishop of Rochester, and who wrote the epitaph jointly with Dr. Freind.”—Lansdowne MSS., No. 908, p. 162.

The anecdote has appeared, but without any authority. Dr. Symmons, in his “Life of Milton,” observing on what he calls Dr. Johnson’s “biographical libel on Milton,” that Dr. Johnson has mentioned this fact, seems to suspect its authenticity; for, if true, “it would cover the respectable name of Sprat with eternal dishonour.” Of its truth the above gives sufficient authority; but at all events the prejudices of Sprat must be pardoned, while I am showing that minds far greater than his have shared in the same unhappy feeling. Dr. Symmons himself bears no light stain for his slanderous criticism on the genius of Thomas Warton, from the motive we are discussing; though Warton, as my text shows, was too a sinner! I recollect in my youth a more extraordinary instance than any other which relates to Milton. A woman of no education, who had retired from the business of life, became a very extraordinary reader; accident had thrown into her way a large library composed of authors who wrote in the reigns of the two Charleses. She turned out one of the malignant party, and an abhorrer of the Commonwealth’s men. Her opinion of Cromwell and Milton may be given. She told me it was no wonder that the rebel who had been secretary to the usurper should have been able to have drawn so finished a character of Satan, and that the PandÆmonium, with all the oratorical devils, was only such as he had himself viewed at Oliver’s council-board.

I throw into this note several curious notices respecting Burnet, and chiefly from contemporaries.

Burnet has been accused, after a warm discussion, of returning home in a passion, and then writing the character of a person. But as his feelings were warm, it is probable he might have often practised the reverse. An anecdote of the times is preserved in “The Memoirs of Grub-street,” vol. ii. p. 291. “A noble peer now living declares he stood with a very ill grace in the history, till he had an opportunity put into his hands of obliging the bishop, by granting a favour at court, upon which the bishop told a friend, within an hour, that he was mistaken in such a lord, and must go and alter his whole character; and so he happens to have a pretty good one.” In this place I also find this curious extract from the MS. “Memoirs of the M—— of H——.” “Such a day Dr. B——t told me King William was an obstinate, conceited man, that would take no advice; and on this day King William told me that Dr. B——t was a troublesome, impertinent man, whose company he could not endure.” These anecdotes are very probable, and lead one to reflect. Some political tergiversation has been laid to his charge; Swift accused him of having once been an advocate for passive obedience and absolute power. He has been reproached with the deepest ingratitude, for the purpose of gratifying his darling passion of popularity, in his conduct respecting the Duke of Lauderdale, his former patron. If the following piece of secret history be true, he showed too much of a compliant humour, at the cost of his honour. I find it in Bishop Kennet’s MSS. “Dr. Burnet having over night given in some important depositions against the Earl of Lauderdale to the House of Commons, was, before morning, by the intercession of the D——, made king’s chaplain and preacher at the Rolls; so he was bribed to hold the peace.”—Lansdowne MSS., 990. This was quite a politician’s short way to preferment! An honest man cannot leap up the ascent, however he may try to climb. There was something morally wrong in this transaction, because Burnet notices it, and acknowledges—“I was much blamed for what I had done.” The story is by no means refuted by the naÏve apology.

Burnet’s character has been vigorously attacked, with all the nerve of satire, in “Faction Displayed,” attributed to Shippen, whom Pope celebrates—

Shippen was a Tory. In “Faction Displayed,” Burnet is represented with his Cabal (so some party nicknames the other), on the accession of Queen Anne, plotting the disturbance of her government. “Black Aris’s fierceness,” that is Burnet, is thus described:—

One hardly suspects the hermit Parnell capable of writing rather harsh verses, yet stinging satire; they are not in his works; but he wrote the following lines on a report of a fire breaking out in Burnet’s library, which had like to have answered the purpose some wished—of condemning the author and his works to the flames—

Thomas Warton smiles at Burnet for the horrors of Popery which perpetually haunted him, in his “Life of Sir T. Pope,” p. 53. But if we substitute the term arbitrary power for popery, no Briton will join in the abuse Burnet has received on this account. A man of Burnet’s fervid temper, whose foible was strong vanity and a passion for popularity, would often rush headlong into improprieties of conduct and language; his enemies have taken ample advantage of his errors; but many virtues his friends have recorded; and the elaborate and spirited character which the Marquis of Halifax has drawn of Burnet may soothe his manes, and secure its repose amid all these disturbances around his tomb. This fine character is preserved in the “Biographia Britannica.” Burnet is not the only instance of the motives of a man being honourable, while his actions are frequently the reverse, from his impetuous nature. He has been reproached for a want of that truth which he solemnly protests he scrupulously adhered to; yet, of many circumstances which were at the time condemned as “lies,” when Time drew aside the mighty veil, Truth was discovered beneath. Tovey, with his visual good humour, in his “Anglia Judaica,” p. 277, notices “that pleasant copious imagination which will for ever rank our English Burnet with the Grecian Heliodorus.” Roger North, in his “Examen,” p. 413, calls him “a busy Scotch parson.” Lord Orford sneers at his hasty epithets, and the colloquial carelessness of his style, in his “Historic Doubts,” where, in a note, he mentions “one Burnet” tells a ridiculous story, mimicking Burnet’s chit-chat, and concludes surprisingly with, “So the Prince of Orange mounted the throne.”

After reading this note, how would that learned foreigner proceed, who I have supposed might be projecting the “Judgments of the Learned” on our English authors? Were he to condemn Burnet as an historian void of all honour and authority, he would not want for documents. It would require a few minutes to explain to the foreigner the nature of political criticism.

Dryden was very coarsely satirised in the political poems of his own day; and among the rest, in “The Session of the Poets,”—a general onslaught directed against the writers of the time, which furnishes us with many examples of unjust criticism on these literary men, entirely originating in political feeling. One example may suffice;

Dr. Wagstaffe, in his “Character of Steele,” alludes to the rumour which Pope has sent down to posterity in a single verse: “I should have thought Mr. Steele might have the example of his friend before his eyes, who had the reputation of being the author of The Dispensary, till, by two or three unlucky after-claps, he proved himself incapable of writing it.”—Wagstaffe’s Misc. Works, p. 136.

I know not how to ascertain the degree of political skill which Steele reached in his new career—he was at least a spirited Whig, but the ministry was then under the malignant influence of the concealed adherents to the Stuarts, particularly of Bolingbroke, and such as Atterbury, whose secret history is now much better known than in their own day. The terrors of the Whigs were not unfounded. Steele in the House disappointed his friends; from his popular Essays, it was expected he would have been a fluent orator; this was no more the case with him than Addison. On this De Foe said he had better have continued the Spectator than the Tatler.—Lansdowne’s MSS. 1097.

Wagstaffe’s “Miscellaneous Works,” 1726, have been collected into a volume. They contain satirical pieces of humour, accompanied by some Hogarthian prints. His “Comment upon the History of Tom Thumb,” ridicules Addison’s on the old ballad of “Chevy Chase,” who had declared “it was full of the majestic simplicity which we admire in the greatest of the ancient poets,” and quoted passages which he paralleled with several in the Æneid. Wagstaffe tells us he has found “in the library of a schoolboy, among other undiscovered valuable authors, one more proper to adorn the shelves of Bodley or the Vatican than to be confined to the obscurity of a private study.” This little Homer is the chanter of Tom Thumb. He performs his office of “a true commentator,” proving the congenial spirit of the poet of Thumb with that of the poet of Æneas. Addison got himself ridiculed for that fine natural taste, which felt all the witchery of our ballad-Enniuses, whose beauties, had Virgil lived with Addison, he would have inlaid into his mosaic. The bigotry of classical taste, which is not always accompanied by a natural one, and rests securely on prescribed opinions and traditional excellence, long contemned our vernacular genius, spurning at the minstrelsy of the nation; Johnson’s ridicule of “Percy’s Reliques” had its hour, but the more poetical mind of Scott has brought us back to home feelings, to domestic manners, and eternal nature.

I shall content myself with referring to “The Character of Richard St—le, Esq.,” in Dr. Wagstaffe’s Miscellaneous Works, 1726. Considering that he had no personal knowledge of his victim, one may be well surprised at his entering so deeply into his private history; but of such a character as Steele, the private history is usually too public—a mass of scandal for the select curious. Poor Steele, we are told, was “arrested for the maintenance of his bastards, and afterwards printed a proposal that the public should take care of them;” got into the House “not to be arrested;”—“his set speeches there, which he designs to get extempore to speak in the House.” For his literary character we are told that “Steele was a jay who borrowed a feather from the peacock, another from the bullfinch, and another from the magpye; so that Dick is made up of borrowed colours; he borrowed his humour from Estcourt, criticism of Addison, his poetry of Pope, and his politics of Ridpath; so that his qualifications as a man of genius, like Mr. T——s, as a member of Parliament, lie in thirteen parishes.” Such are the pillows made up for genius to rest its head on!

Wagstaffe has sometimes delicate humour; Steele, who often wrote in haste, necessarily wrote incorrectly. Steele had this sentence: “And ALL, as one man, will join in a common indignation against ALL who would perplex our obedience:” on which our pleasant critic remarks—“Whatever contradiction there is, as some suppose, in all joining against all, our author has good authority for what he says; and it may be proved, in spite of Euclid or Sir Isaac, that everything consists of two alls, that these alls are capable of being divided and subdivided into as many alls as you please, and so ad infinitum. The following lines may serve for an illustration:—

“Though this polite author does not directly say there are two alls, yet he implies as much; for I would ask any reasonable man what can be understood by the rest they ran away, but the other all we have been speaking of? The world may see that I can exhibit the beauties, as well as quarrel with the faults, of his composition, but I hope he will not value himself on his hasty productions.”

Poor Steele, with the best humour, bore these perpetual attacks, not, however, without an occasional groan, just enough to record his feelings. In one of his wild, yet well-meant projects, of the invention of “a Fish-pool, or Vessel for Importing Fish Alive,” 1718, he complains of calumnies and impertinent observations on him, and seems to lay some to the account of his knighthood:—“While he was pursuing what he believed might conduce to the common good, he gave the syllables Richard Steele to the publick, to be used and treated as they should think fit; he must go on in the same indifference, and allow the Town their usual liberty with his name, which I find they think they have much more room to sport with than formerly, as it is lengthened with the monosyllable Sir.”

“Rehearsal Transprosed,” p. 45.

The late Gilbert Wakefield is an instance where the political and theological opinions of a recluse student tainted his pure literary works. Condemned as an enraged Jacobin by those who were Unitarians in politics, and rejected because he was a Unitarian in religion by the orthodox, poor Wakefield’s literary labours were usually reduced to the value of waste-paper. We smile, but half in sorrow, in reading a letter, where he says, “I meditate a beginning, during the winter, of my criticisms on all the ancient Greek and Latin authors, by small piecemeals, on the cheapest possible paper, and at the least possible expense of printing. As I can never do more than barely indemnify myself, I shall print only 250 copies.” He half-ruined himself by his splendid edition of Lucretius, which could never obtain even common patronage from the opulent friends of classical literature. Since his death it has been reprinted, and is no doubt now a marketable article for the bookseller; so that if some authors are not successful for themselves, it is a comfort to think how useful, in a variety of shapes, they are made so to others. Even Gilbert’s “contracted scheme of publication” he was compelled to abandon! Yet the classic erudition of Wakefield was confessed, and is still remembered. No one will doubt that we have lost a valuable addition to our critical stores by this literary persecution, were it only in the present instance; but examples are too numerous!

Shaftesbury has thrown out, on this head, some important truths:—“If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously, they will do it ironically. If they find it dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, invoke themselves into mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood. The persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.”—Vol. i. p. 71. The subject of our present inquiry is a very remarkable instance of “involving himself into mysteriousness.” To this cause we owe the strong raillery of Marvell; the cloudy “Oracles of Reason” of Blount; and the formidable, though gross burlesque, of Hickeringill, the rector of All-Saints, in Colchester. “Of him (says the editor of his collected works, 1716), the greatest writers of our times trembled at his pen; and as great a genius as Sir Roger L’Estrange’s was, it submitted to his superior way of reasoning”—that is, to a most extraordinary burlesque spirit in politics and religion. But even he who made others tremble felt the terrors he inflicted; for he complains that “some who have thought his pen too sharp and smart, those who have been galled, sore men where the skin’s off, have long lain to catch for somewhat to accuse me—upon such touchy subjects, a man had need have the dexterity to split a hair, to handle them pertinently, usefully, and yet safely and warily.”—Such men, however, cannot avoid their fate: they will be persecuted, however they succeed in “splitting a hair;” and it is then they have recourse to the most absurd subterfuges, to which our Hobbes was compelled. Thus also it happened to Woolston, who wrote in a ludicrous way “Blasphemies” against the miracles of Christ; calling them “tales and rodomontados.” He rested his defence on this subterfuge, that “it was meant to place the Christian religion on a better footing,” &c. But the Court answered, that “if the author of a treasonable libel should write at the conclusion, God save the king! it would not excuse him.”

The moral axiom of Solon “Know thyself” (Nosce teipsum), applied by the ancient sage as a corrective for our own pride and vanity, Hobbes contracts into a narrow principle, when, in his introduction to “The Leviathan,” he would infer that, by this self-inspection, we are enabled to determine on the thoughts and passions of other men; and thus he would make the taste, the feelings, the experience of the individual decide for all mankind. This simple error has produced all the dogmas of cynicism; for the cynic is one whose insulated feelings, being all of the selfish kind, can imagine no other stirrer of even our best affections, and strains even our loftiest virtues into pitiful motives. Two noble authors, men of the most dignified feelings, have protested against this principle. Lord Shaftesbury keenly touches the characters of Hobbes and Rochester:—“Sudden courage, says our modern philosopher (Hobbes), is anger. If so, courage, considered as constant, and belonging to a character, must, in his account, be defined constant anger, or anger constantly recurring. All men, says a witty poet (Rochester), would be cowards, if they durst: that the poet and the philosopher both were cowards, may be yielded, perhaps, without dispute! they may have spoken the best of their knowledge.”—Shaftesbury, vol. i. p. 119.

With an heroic spirit, that virtuous statesman, Lord Clarendon, rejects the degrading notion of Hobbes. When he looked into his own breast, he found that courage was a real virtue, which had induced him, had it been necessary, to have shed his blood as a patriot. But death, in the judgment of Hobbes, was the most terrible event, and to be avoided by any means. Lord Clarendon draws a parallel between a “man of courage” and one of the disciples of Hobbes, “brought to die together, by a judgment they cannot avoid.” “How comes it to pass, that one of these undergoes death, with no other concernment than as if he were going any other journey; and the other with such confusion and trembling, that he is even without life before he dies; if it were true that all men fear alike upon the like occasion?”—Survey of the Leviathan, p. 14.

They were distinguished as Hobbists, and the opinions as Hobbianism. Their chief happened to be born on a Good Friday; and in the metrical history of his own life he seems to have considered it as a remarkable event. An atom had its weight in the scales by which his mighty egotism weighed itself. He thus marks the day of his birth, innocently enough:—

But the Hobbists declared more openly (as Wood tells us), that “as our Saviour Christ went out of the world on that day to save the men of the world, so another saviour came into the world on that day to save them!”

That the sect spread abroad, as well as at home, is told us by Lord Clarendon, in the preface to his “Survey of the Leviathan.” The qualities of the author, as well as the book, were well adapted for proselytism; for Clarendon, who was intimately acquainted with him, notices his confidence in conversation—his never allowing himself to be contradicted—his bold inferences—the novelty of his expressions—and his probity, and a life free from scandal. “The humour and inclination of the time to all kind of paradoxes,” was indulged by a pleasant clear style, an appearance of order and method, hardy paradoxes, and accommodating principles to existing circumstances.

Who were the sect composed of? The monstrous court of Charles II.—the grossest materialists! The secret history of that court could scarcely find a Suetonius among us. But our author was frequently in the hands of those who could never have comprehended what they pretended to admire; this appears by a publication of the times, intituled, “Twelve Ingenious Characters, &c.” 1686, where, in that of a town-fop, who, “for genteel breeding, posts to town, by his mother’s indulgence, three or four wild companions, half-a-dozen bottles of Burgundy, two leaves of Leviathan,” and some few other obvious matters, shortly make this young philosopher nearly lose his moral and physical existence. “He will not confess himself an Atheist, yet he boasts aloud that he holds his gospel from the Apostle of Malmesbury, though it is more than probable he never read, at least understood, ten leaves of that unlucky author.” If such were his wretched disciples, Hobbes was indeed “an unlucky author,” for their morals and habits were quite opposite to those of their master. Eachard, in the preface to his Second Dialogue, 1673, exhibits a very Lucianic arrangement of his disciples—Hobbes’ “Pit, Box, and Gallery Friends.” The Pit-friends were sturdy practicants who, when they hear that “Ill-nature, Debauchery, and Irreligion were Mathematics and Demonstration, clap and shout, and swear by all that comes from Malmesbury.” The Gallery are “a sort of small, soft, little, pretty, fine gentlemen, who having some little wit, some little modesty, some little remain of conscience and country religion, could not hector it as the former, but quickly learnt to chirp and giggle when t’other clapt and shouted.” But “the Don-admirers, and Box-friends of Mr. Hobbes are men of gravity and reputation, who will scarce simper in favour of the philosopher, but can make shift to nod and nod again.” Even amid this wild satire we find a piece of truth in a dark corner; for the satirist confesses that “his Gallery-friends, who were such resolved practicants in Hobbianism (by which the satirist means all kinds of licentiousness) would most certainly have been so, had there never been any such man as Mr. Hobbes in the world.” Why then place to the account of the philosopher those gross immoralities which he never sanctioned? The life of Hobbes is without a stain! He had other friends besides these “Box, Pit, and Gallery” gentry—the learned of Europe, and many of the great and good men of his own country.

Hobbes, in defending Thucydides, whom he has so admirably translated, from the charge of some obscurity in his design, observes that “Marcellinus saith he was obscure, on purpose that the common people might not understand him; and not unlikely, for a wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men), that wise men only should be able to commend him.” Thus early in life Hobbes had determined on a principle which produced all his studied ambiguity, involved him in so much controversy, and, in some respects, preserved him in an inglorious security.

Hobbes explains the image in his Introduction. He does not disguise his opinion that Men may be converted into Automatons; and if he were not very ingenious we might lose our patience. He was so delighted with this whimsical fancy of his “artificial man,” that he carried it on to government itself, and employed the engraver to impress the monstrous personification on our minds, even clearer than by his reasonings. The curious design forms the frontispiece of “The Leviathan.” He borrowed the name from that sea-monster, that mightiest of powers, which Job has told is not to be compared with any on earth. The sea-monster is here, however, changed into a colossal man, entirely made up of little men from all the classes of society, bearing in the right hand the sword, and in the left the crosier. The compartments are full of political allegories. An expression of Lord Clarendon’s in the preface to his “Survey of the Leviathan,” shows our philosopher’s infatuation to this “idol of the Den,” as Lord Bacon might have called the intellectual illusion of the philosopher. Hobbes, when at Paris, showed a proof-sheet or two of his work to Clarendon, who, he soon discovered, could not approve of the hardy tenets. “He frequently came to me,” says his lordship, “and told me his book (which he would call Leviathan) was then printing in England. He said, that he knew when I read his book I would not like it, and mentioned some of his conclusions: upon which I asked him, why he would publish such doctrine: to which, after a discourse, between jest and earnest, he said, The truth is, I have a mind to go home!” Some philosophical systems have, probably, been raised “between jest and earnest;” yet here was a text-book for the despot, as it is usually accepted, deliberately given to the world, for no other purpose than that the philosopher was desirous of changing his lodgings at Paris for his old apartments in London!

The duplicity of the system is strikingly revealed by Burnet, who tells of Hobbes, that “he put all the law in the will of the prince or the people; for he writ his book at first in favour of absolute monarchy, but turned it afterwards to gratify the republican party. These were his true principles, though he had disguised them for deceiving unwary readers.” It is certain Hobbes became a suspected person among the royalists. They were startled at the open extravagance of some of his political paradoxes; such as his notion of the necessity of extirpating all the Greek and Latin authors, “by reading of which men from their childhood have gotten a habit of licentious controuling the actions of their sovereigns.”—p. 111. But the doctrines of liberty were not found only among the Greeks and Romans; the Hebrews were stern republicans; and liberty seems to have had a nobler birth in the North among our German ancestors, than perhaps in any other part of the globe. It is certain that the Puritans, who warmed over the Bible more than the classic historians, had their heads full of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea; the hanging of the five kings of Joshua; and the fat king of the Moabites, who in his summer-room received a present, and then a dagger, from the left-handed Jewish Jacobin. Hobbes curiously compares “The tyrannophobia, or fear of being strongly governed,” to the hydrophobia. “When a monarchy is once bitten to the quick by those democratical writers, and, by their poison, men seem to be converted into dogs,” his remedy is, “a strong monarch,” or “the exercise of entire sovereignty,” p. 171; and that the authority he would establish should be immutable, he hardily asserts that “the ruling power cannot be punished for mal-administration.” Yet in this elaborate system of despotism are interspersed some strong republican axioms, as The safety of the people is the supreme law,—The public good to be preferred to that of the individual:—and that God made the one for the many, and not the many for the one. The effect the Leviathan produced on the royal party was quite unexpected by the author. His hardy principles were considered as a satire on arbitrary power, and Hobbes himself as a concealed favourer of democracy. This has happened more than once with such vehement advocates. Our philosopher must have been thunderstruck at the insinuation, for he had presented the royal exile, as Clarendon in his “Survey” informs us, with a magnificent copy of “The Leviathan,” written on vellum; this beautiful specimen of calligraphy may still be seen, as we learn from the Gentleman’s Magazine for January, 1813, where the curiosity is fully described. The suspicion of Hobbes’s principles was so strong, that it produced his sudden dismissal from the presence of Charles II. when at Paris. The king, indeed, said he believed Hobbes intended him no hurt; and Hobbes said of the king, “that his majesty understood his writings better than his accusers.” However, happy was Hobbes to escape from France, where the officers were in pursuit of him, amid snowy roads and nipping blasts. The lines in his metrical life open a dismal winter scene for an old man on a stumbling horse:—

A curious spectacle! to observe, under a despotic government, its vehement advocate in flight!

The ambiguity of “The Leviathan” seemed still more striking, when Hobbes came, at length, to place the right of government merely in what he terms “the Seat of Power,”—a wonderful principle of expediency; for this was equally commodious to the republicans and to the royalists. By this principle, the republicans maintained the right of Cromwell, since his authority was established, while it absolved the royalists from their burdensome allegiance; for, according to “The Leviathan,” Charles was the English monarch only when in a condition to force obedience; and, to calm tender consciences, the philosopher further fixed on that precise point of time, “when a subject may obey an unjust conqueror.” After the Restoration, it was subtilely urged by the Hobbists, that this very principle had greatly served the royal cause; for it afforded a plea for the emigrants to return, by compounding for their estates, and joining with those royalists who had remained at home in an open submission to the established government; and thus they were enabled to concert their measures in common, for reinstating the old monarchy. Had the Restoration never taken place, Hobbes would have equally insisted on the soundness of his doctrine; he would have asserted the title of Richard Cromwell to the Protectorate, if Richard had had the means to support it, as zealously as he afterwards did that of Charles II. to the throne, when the king had firmly re-established it. The philosophy of Hobbes, therefore, is not dangerous in any government; its sole aim is to preserve it from intestine divisions; but for this purpose, he was for reducing men to mere machines. With such little respect he treated the species, and with such tenderness the individual!

I will give Hobbes’s own justification, after the Restoration of Charles II., when accused by the great mathematician, Dr. Wallis, a republican under Cromwell, of having written his work in defence of Oliver’s government. Hobbes does not deny that “he placed the right of government wheresoever should be the strength.” Most subtilely he argues, how this very principle “was designed in behalf of the faithful subjects of the king,” after they had done their utmost to defend his rights and person. The government of Cromwell being established, these found themselves without the protection of a government of their own, and therefore might lawfully promise obedience to their victor for the saving of their lives and fortunes; and more, they ought even to protect that authority in war by which they were themselves protected in peace. But this plea, which he so ably urged in favour of the royalists, will not, however, justify those who, like Wallis, voluntarily submitted to Cromwell, because they were always the enemies of the king; so that this submission to Oliver is allowed only to the royalists—a most admirable political paradox! The whole of the argument is managed with infinite dexterity, and is thus unexpectedly turned against his accusers themselves. The principle of “self-preservation” is carried on through the entire system of Hobbes.—Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, &c., of Mr. Hobbes.

Warburton has most acutely distinguished between the intention of Hobbes and that of some of his successors. The bishop does not consider Hobbes as an enemy to religion, not even to the Christian; and even doubts whether he has attacked it in “The Leviathan.” At all events, he has “taken direct contrary measures from those of Bayle, Collins, Tindal, Bolingbroke, and all that school. They maliciously endeavoured to show the Gospel was unreasonable; Hobbes, as reasonable as his admirable wit could represent it: they contended for the most unbounded toleration, Hobbes for the most rigorous conformity.” See the “Alliance between Church and State,” book i. c. v. It is curious to observe the noble disciple of Hobbes, Lord Bolingbroke, a strenuous advocate for his political and moral opinions, enraged at what he calls his “High Church notions.” Trenchard and Gordon, in their Independent Whig, No. 44, that libel on the clergy, accuse them of Atheism and Hobbism; while some divines as earnestly reject Hobbes as an Atheist! Our temperate sage, though angried at that spirit of contradiction which he had raised, must, however, have sometimes smiled both on his advocates and his adversaries!

The odious term of Atheist has been too often applied to many great men of our nation by the hardy malignity of party. Were I to present a catalogue, the very names would refute the charge. Let us examine the religious sentiments of Hobbes. The materials for its investigation are not common, but it will prove a dissertation of facts. I warn some of my readers to escape from the tediousness, if they cannot value the curiosity.

Hobbes has himself thrown out an observation in his “Life of Thucydides” respecting Anaxagoras, that “his opinions, being of a strain above the apprehension of the vulgar, procured him the estimation of an Atheist, which name they bestowed upon all men that thought not as they did of their ridiculous religion, and in the end cost him his life.” This was a parallel case with Hobbes himself, except its close, which, however, seems always to have been in the mind of our philosopher.

Bayle, who is for throwing all things into doubt, acknowledging that the life of Hobbes was blameless, adds, One might, however, have been tempted to ask him this question:

But Bayle, who compared himself to the Jupiter of Homer, powerful in gathering and then dispersing the clouds, dissipates the one he had just raised, by showing how “Hobbes might have answered the question with sincerity and belief, according to the writers of his life.”—But had Bayle known that Hobbes was the author of all the lives of himself, so partial an evidence might have raised another doubt with the great sceptic. It appears, by Aubrey’s papers, that Hobbes did not wish his biography should appear when he was living, that he might not seem the author of it.

Baxter, who knew Hobbes intimately, ranks him with Spinosa, by a strong epithet for materialists—“The Brutists, Hobbes, and Spinosa.” He tells us that Selden would not have him in his chamber while dying, calling out, “No Atheists!” But by Aubrey’s papers it appears that Hobbes stood by the side of his dying friend. It is certain his enemies raised stories against him, and told them as suited their purpose. In the Lansdowne MSS. I find Dr. Grenville, in a letter, relates how “Hobbes, when in France, and like to die, betrayed such expressions of repentance to a great prelate, from whose mouth I had this relation, that he admitted him to the sacrament. But Hobbes afterwards made this a subject of ridicule in companies.”—Lansdowne MSS. 990—73.

Here is a strong accusation, and a fact too; yet, when fully developed, the result will turn out greatly in favour of Hobbes.

Hobbes had a severe illness at Paris, which lasted six months, thus noticed in his metrical life:

It happened that the famous Guy Patin was his physician; and in one of these amusing letters, where he puts down the events of the day, like a newspaper of the times, in No. 61, has given an account of his intercourse with the philosopher, in which he says that Hobbes endured such pain, that he would have destroyed himself—“Qu’il avoit voulu se tuer.”—Patin is a vivacious writer: we are not to take him au pied de la lettre. Hobbes was systematically tenacious of life: and, so far from attempting suicide, that he wanted even the courage to allow Patin to bleed him! It was during this illness that the Catholic party, who like to attack a Protestant in a state of unresisting debility, got his learned and intimate friend, Father Mersenne, to hold out all the benefits a philosopher might derive from their Church. When Hobbes was acquainted with this proposed interview (says a French contemporary, whose work exists in MS., but is quoted in Joly’s folio volume of Remarks on Bayle), the sick man answered, “Don’t let him come for this; I shall laugh at him; and perhaps I may convert him myself.” Father Mersenne did come; and when this missionary was opening on the powers of Rome to grant a plenary pardon, he was interrupted by Hobbes—“Father, I have examined, a long time ago, all these points; I should be sorry to dispute now; you can entertain me in a more agreeable manner. When did you see Mr. Gassendi?” The monk, who was a philosopher, perfectly understood Hobbes, and this interview never interrupted their friendship. A few days after, Dr. Cosin (afterwards Bishop of Durham), the great prelate whom Dr. Grenville alludes to, prayed with Hobbes, who first stipulated that the prayers should be those authorised by the Church of England; and he also received the sacrament with reverence. Hobbes says:—“Magnum hoc erga disciplinam Episcopalem signum erat reverentiÆ.”—It is evident that the conversion of Father Mersenne, to which Hobbes facetiously alluded, could never be to Atheism, but to Protestantism: and had Hobbes been an Atheist, he would not have risked his safety, when he arrived in England, by his strict attendance to the Church of England, resolutely refusing to unite with any of the sects. His views of the national religion were not only enlightened, but in this respect he showed a boldness in his actions very unusual with him.

But the religion of Hobbes was “of a strain beyond the apprehension of the vulgar,” and not very agreeable to some of the Church. A man may have peculiar notions respecting the Deity, and yet be far removed from Atheism; and in his political system the Church may hold that subordinate place which some Bishops will not like. When Dr. Grenville tells us “Hobbes ridiculed in companies” certain matters which the Doctor held sacred, this is not sufficient to accuse a man of Atheism, though it may prove him not to have held orthodox opinions. From the MS. collections of the French contemporary, who well knew Hobbes at Paris, I transcribe a remarkable observation:—“Hobbes said, that he was not surprised that the Independents, who were enemies of monarchy, could not bear it in heaven, and that therefore they placed there three Gods instead of one; but he was astonished that the English bishops, and those Presbyterians who were favourers of monarchy, should persist in the same opinion concerning the Trinity. He added, that the Episcopalians ridiculed the Puritans, and the Puritans the Episcopalians; but that the wise ridiculed both alike.”—Lantiniana MS. quoted by Joly, p. 434.

The religion of Hobbes was in conformity to State and Church. He had, however, the most awful notions of the Divinity. He confesses he is unacquainted with “the nature of God, but not with the necessity of the existence of the Power of all powers, and First Cause of all causes; so that we know that God is, though not what he is.” See his “Human Nature,” chap. xi. But was the God of Hobbes the inactive deity of Epicurus, who takes no interest in the happiness or misery of his created beings; or, as Madame de StaËl has expressed it, with the point and felicity of French antithesis, was this “an Atheism with a God?” This consequence some of his adversaries would draw from his principles, which Hobbes indignantly denies. He has done more; for in his De Corpore Politico, he declares his belief of all the fundamental points of Christianity, part i. c. 4, p. 116. Ed. 1652. But he was an open enemy to those “who presume, out of Scripture, by their own interpretation, to raise any doctrine to the understanding, concerning those things which are incomprehensible;” and he refers to St. Paul, who gives a good rule “to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.”—Rom. xii. 3.

This he pictures in a strange engraving prefixed to his book, and representing a crowned figure, whose description will be found in the note, p. 440. It is remarkable that when Hobbes adopted the principle that the ecclesiastical should be united with the sovereign power, he was then actually producing that portentous change which had terrified Luther and Calvin; who, even in their day, were alarmed by a new kind of political Antichrist; that “CÆsarean Popery” which Stubbe so much dreaded, and which I have here noticed, p. 358. Luther predicted that as the pope had at times seized on the political sword, so this “CÆsarean Popery,” under the pretence of policy, would grasp the ecclesiastical crosier, to form a political church. The curious reader is referred to Wolfius Lectionum Memorabilium et reconditarum, vol. ii. cent. x. p. 987. Calvin, in his commentary on Amos, has also a remarkable passage on this political church, animadverting on Amaziah, the priest, who would have proved the Bethel worship warrantable, because settled by the royal authority: “It is the king’s chapel.” Amos, vii. 13. Thus Amaziah, adds Calvin, assigns the king a double function, and maintains it is in his power to transform religion into what shape he pleases, while he charges Amos with disturbing the public repose, and encroaching on the royal prerogative. Calvin zealously reprobates the conduct of those inconsiderate persons, “who give the civil magistrate a sovereignty in religion, and dissolve the Church into the State.” The supremacy in Church and State, conferred on Henry VIII., was the real cause of these alarms; but the passage of domination raged not less fiercely in Calvin than in Henry VIII.; in the enemy of kings than in kings themselves. Were the forms of religion more celestial from the sanguinary hands of that tyrannical reformer than from those of the reforming tyrant? The system of our philosopher was, to lay all the wild spirits which have haunted us in the chimerical shapes of nonconformity. I have often thought, after much observation on our Church history since the Reformation, that the devotional feelings have not been so much concerned in this bitter opposition to the National Church as the rage of dominion, the spirit of vanity, the sullen pride of sectarism, and the delusions of madness.

Hobbes himself tells us that “some bishops are content to hold their authority from the king’s letters patents; others will needs have somewhat more they know not what of divine rights, &c., not acknowledging the power of the king. It is a relic still remaining of the venom of popish ambition, lurking in that seditious distinction and division between the power spiritual and civil. The safety of the State does not depend on the safety of the clergy, but on the entireness of the sovereign power.”—Considerations upon the Reputation, &c., of Mr. Hobbes, p. 44.

This royal observation is recorded in the “Sorberiana.” Sorbiere gleaned the anecdote during his residence in England. By the “Aubrey Papers,” which have been published since I composed this article, I find that Charles II. was greatly delighted by the wit and repartees of Hobbes, who was at once bold and happy in making his stand amidst the court wits. The king, whenever he saw Hobbes, who had the privilege of being admitted into the royal presence, would exclaim, “Here comes the bear to be baited.” This did not allude to his native roughness, but the force of his resistance when attacked.

See “Mr. Hobbes’s State of Nature considered, in a Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy.” The second dialogue is not contained in the eleventh edition of Eachard’s Works, 1705, which, however, was long after his death, so careless were the publishers of those days of their authors’ works. The literary bookseller, Tom Davies, who ruined himself by giving good editions of our old authors, has preserved it in his own.

“A Discourse Concerning Irony,” 1729, p. 13.

Men of very opposite principles, but aiming at the same purpose, are reduced to a dilemma, by the spirit of party in controversy. Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote against “The Anarchy of a Limited Monarchy,” and “Patriarcha,” to re-establish absolute power, derived it from the scriptural accounts of the patriarchal state. But Sir Robert and Hobbes, though alike the advocates for supremacy of power, were as opposite as possible on theological points. Filmer had the same work to perform, but he did not like the instruments of his fellow-labourer. His manner of proceeding with Hobbes shows his dilemma: he refutes the doctrine of the “Leviathan,” while he confesses that Hobbes is right in the main. The philosopher’s reasonings stand on quite another foundation than the scriptural authorities deduced by Filmer. The result therefore is, that Sir Robert had the trouble to confute the very thing he afterwards had to establish!

It may be curious to some of my readers to preserve that part of Hobbes’s Letter to Anthony Wood, in the rare tract of his “Latin Life,” in which, with great calmness, the philosopher has painfully collated the odious interpolations. All that was written in favour of the morals of Hobbes—of the esteem in which foreigners held him—of the royal patronage, &c., were maliciously erased. Hobbes thus notices the amendments of Bishop Fell:—

“Nimirum ubi mihi tu ingenium attribuis Sobrium, ille, deleto Sobrio, substituit Acri.

“Ubi tu scripseras Libellum scripsit de Cive, interposuit ille inter Libellum et de Cive, rebus permiscendis natum, de Cive, quod ita manifestÈ falsum est, &c.

“Quod, ubi tu de libro meo Leviathan scripsisti, primÒ, quod esset, Vicinis gentibus notissimus interposuit ille, publico damno. Ubi tu scripseras, scripsit librum, interposuit ille monstrosissimum.”

A noble confidence in his own genius and celebrity breaks out in this Epistle to Wood. “In leaving out all that you have said of my character and reputation, the dean has injured you, but cannot injure me; for long since has my fame winged its way to a station from which it can never descend.” One is surprised to find such a Miltonic spirit in the contracted soul of Hobbes, who in his own system might have cynically ridiculed the passion for fame, which, however, no man felt more than himself. In his controversy with Bishop Bramhall (whose book he was cautious not to answer till ten years after it was published, and his adversary was no more, pretending he had never heard of it till then!) he breaks out with the same feeling:—“What my works are, he was no fit judge; but now he has provoked me, I will say thus much of them, that neither he, if he had lived, could—nor I, if I would, can—extinguish the light which is set up in the world by the greatest part of them.”

It is curious to observe that an idea occurred to Hobbes, which some authors have attempted lately to put into practice against their critics—to prosecute them in a court of law; but the knowledge of mankind was one of the liveliest faculties of Hobbes’s mind; he knew well to what account common minds place the injured feelings of authorship; yet were a jury of literary men to sit in judgment, we might have a good deal of business in the court for a long time; the critics and the authors would finally have a very useful body of reports and pleadings to appeal to; and the public would be highly entertained and greatly instructed. On this attack of Bishop Fell, Hobbes says—“I might perhaps have an action on the case against him, if it were worth my while; but juries seldom consider the Quarrels of Authors as of much moment.”

Bayle has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that Hobbes might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind that it would expose him to spectral visions; and being very timorous, and distrusting his imagination, he was averse to be left alone. Apparitions happen frequently in dreams, and they may happen, even to an incredulous man, when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images—these images, adds Bayle, might play him some unlucky trick! We are here astonished at the ingenuity of a disciple of Pyrrho, who in his inquiries, after having exhausted all human evidence, seems to have demonstrated what he hesitates to believe! Perhaps the truth was, that the sceptical Bayle had not entirely freed himself from the traditions which were then still floating from the fireside to the philosopher’s closet: he points his pen, as Æneas brandished his sword at the Gorgons and Chimeras that darkened the entrance of Hell; wanting the admonitions of the sibyl, he would have rushed in—

The papers of Aubrey confirm my suggestion. I shall give the words—“There was a report, and surely true, that in parliament, not long after the king was settled, some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretique; which he hearing, feared that his papers might be searched by their order, and he told me he had burned part of them.”—p. 612. When Aubrey requested Waller to write verses on Hobbes, the poet said that he was afraid of the Churchmen. Aubrey tells us—“I have often heard him say that he was not afraid of Sprights, but afraid of being knocked on the head for five or ten pounds which rogues might think he had in his chamber.” This reason given by Hobbes for his frequent alarms was an evasive reply for too curious and talkative an inquirer. Hobbes has not concealed the cause of his terror in his metrical life—

Dr. Dorislaus and Ascham had fallen under the daggers of proscription. [The former was assassinated in Holland, whither he had fled for safety.]

It is said that Hobbes completely recanted all his opinions; and proceeded so far as to declare that the opinions he had published in his “Leviathan,” were not his real sentiments, and that he neither maintained them in public nor in private. Wood gives this title to a work of his—“An Apology for Himself and his Writings,” but without date. Some have suspected that this Apology, if it ever existed, was not his own composition. Yet why not? Hobbes, no doubt, thought that “The Leviathan” would outlast any recantation; and, after all, that a recantation is by no means a refutation!—recantations usually prove the force of authority, rather than the force of conviction. I am much pleased with a Dr. Pocklington, who hit the etymology of the word recantation with the spirit. Accused and censured, for a penance he was to make a recantation, which he began thus:—“If canto be to sing, recanto is to sing again:” so that he re-chanted his offensive principles by his recantation!

I suspect that the apology Wood alludes to was only a republication of Hobbes’s Address to the King, prefixed to the “Seven Philosophical Problems,” 1662, where he openly disavows his opinions, and makes an apology for the “Leviathan.” It is curious enough to observe how he acts in this dilemma. It was necessary to give up his opinions to the clergy, but still to prove they were of an innocent nature. He therefore acknowledges that “his theological notions are not his opinions, but propounded with submission to the power ecclesiastical, never afterwards having maintained them in writing or discourse.” Yet, to show the king that the regal power incurred no great risk in them, he laid down one principle, which could not have been unpleasing to Charles II. He asserts, truly, that he never wrote against episcopacy; “yet he is called an Atheist, or man of no religion, because he has made the authority of the Church depend wholly upon the regal power, which, I hope, your majesty will think is neither Atheism nor Heresy.” Hobbes considered the religion of his country as a subject of law, and not philosophy. He was not for separating the Church from the State; but, on the contrary, for joining them more closely. The bishops ought not to have been his enemies; and many were not.

In the MS. collection of the French contemporary, who personally knew him, we find a remarkable confession of Hobbes. He said of himself that “he sometimes made openings to let in light, but that he could not discover his thoughts but by half-views: like those who throw open the window for a short time, but soon closing it, from the dread of the storm.” “Il disoit qu’il faisoit quelquefois des ouvertures, mais qu’il ne pouvoit dÉcouvrir ses pensÉes qu’À-demi; qu’il imitoit ceux qui ouvrent la fenÊtre pendant quelques momens, mais qui la referment promptement de peur de l’orage.”—Lantiniana MSS., quoted by Joly in his volume of “Remarques sur Bayle.”

Could one imagine that the very head and foot of the stupendous “Leviathan” bear the marks of the little artifices practised for self by its author? This grave work is dedicated to Francis Godolphin, a person whom its author had never seen, merely to remind him of a certain legacy which that person’s brother had left to our philosopher. If read with this fact before us, we may detect the concealed claim to the legacy, which it seems was necessary to conceal from the Parliament, as Francis Godolphin resided in England. It must be confessed this was a miserable motive for dedicating a system of philosophy which was addressed to all mankind. It discovers little dignity. This secret history we owe to Lord Clarendon, in his “Survey of the Leviathan,” who adds another. The postscript to the “Leviathan,” which is only in the English edition, was designed as an easy summary of the principles: and his lordship adds, as a sly address to Cromwell, that he might be induced to be master of them at once, and “as a pawn of his new subject’s allegiance.” It is possible that Hobbes might have anticipated the sovereign power which the general was on the point of assuming in the protectorship. It was natural enough, that Hobbes should deny this suggestion.

The story his antagonist (Dr. Wallis) relates is perfectly in character. Hobbes, to show the Countess of Devonshire his attachment to life, declared that “were he master of all the world to dispose of, he would give it to live one day.” “But you have so many friends to oblige, had you the world to dispose of!” “Shall I be the better for that when I am dead?” “No,” repeated the sublime cynic, “I would give the whole world to live one day.” He asserted that “it was lawful to make use of ill instruments to do ourselves good,” and illustrated it thus:—“Were I cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his cloven foot, I would take hold of it to be drawn out by it.” It must be allowed this is a philosophy which has a chance of being long popular; but it is not that of another order of human beings! Hobbes would not, like Curtius, have leaped into a “deep pit” for his country; or, to drop the fable, have died for it in the field or on the scaffold, like the Falklands, the Sidneys, the Montroses—all the heroic brotherhood of genius! One of his last expressions, when informed of the approaches of death, was—“I shall be glad to find a hole to creep out of the world at.” Everything was seen in a little way by this great man, who, having reasoned himself into an abject being, “licked the dust” through life.

In our country, Mandeville, Swift, and Chesterfield have trod in the track of Hobbes; and in France, Helvetius, Rochefoucault in his “Maxims,” and L’Esprit more openly in his “FausettÉ des Vertus Humaines.” They only degrade us—they are polished cynics! But what are we to think of the tremendous cynicism of Machiavel? That great genius eyed human nature with the ferocity of an enraged savage. Machiavel is a vindictive assassin, who delights even to turn his dagger within the mortal wound he has struck; but our Hobbes, said his friend Sorbiere, “is a gentle and skilful surgeon, who, with regret, cuts into the living flesh, to get rid of the corrupted.” It is equally to be regretted that the same system of degrading man has been adopted by some, under the mask of religion.

Yet Hobbes, perhaps, never suspected the arms he was placing in the hands of wretched men, when he furnished them with such fundamental positions as, that “Man is naturally an evil being; that he does not love his equal; and only seeks the aid of society for his own particular purposes.” He would at least have disowned some of his diabolical disciples. One of them, so late as in 1774, vented his furious philosophy in “An Essay on the Depravity and Corruption of Human Nature, wherein the Opinions of Hobbes, Mandeville, Helvetius, &c. are supported against Shaftesbury, Hume, Sterne, &c. by Thomas O’Brien M’Mahon.” This gentleman, once informed that he was born wicked, appears to have considered that wickedness was his paternal estate, to be turned to as profitable an account as he could. The titles of his chapters, serving as a string of the most extraordinary propositions, have been preserved in the “Monthly Review,” vol. lii. 77. The demonstrations in the work itself must be still more curious. In these axioms we find that “Man has an enmity to all beings; that had he power, the first victims of his revenge would be his wife, children, &c.—a sovereign, if he could reign with the unbounded authority every man longs for, free from apprehension of punishment for misrule, would slaughter all his subjects; perhaps he would not leave one of them alive at the end of his reign.” It was perfectly in character with this wretched being, after having quarrelled with human nature, that he should be still more inveterate against a small part of her family, with whom he was suffered to live on too intimate terms; for he afterwards published another extraordinary piece—“The Conduct and Good-Nature of Englishmen Exemplified in their charitable way of Characterising the Customs, Manners, &c. of Neighbouring Nations; their Equitable and Humane Mode of Governing States, &c.; their Elevated and Courteous Deportment, &c. of which their own Authors are everywhere produced as Vouchers,” 1777. One is tempted to think that this O’Brien M’Mahon, after all, is only a wag, and has copied the horrid pictures of his masters, as Hogarth did the School of Rembrandt by his “Paul before Felix, designed and scratched in the true Dutch taste.” These works seem, however, to have their use. To have carried the conclusions of the Anti-social Philosophy to as great lengths as this writer has, is to display their absurdity. But, as every rational Englishman will appeal to his own heart, in declaring the one work to be nothing but a libel on the nation; so every man, not destitute of virtuous emotions, will feel the other to be a libel on human nature itself.

“Human Nature,” c. ix.

Hobbes did not exaggerate the truth. Aubrey says of Cooper’s portrait of Hobbes, that “he intends to borrow the picture of his majesty, for Mr. Loggan to engrave an accurate piece by, which will sell well at home and abroad.” We have only the rare print of Hobbes by Faithorne, prefixed to a quarto edition of his Latin Life, 1682, remarkable for its expression and character. Sorbiere, returning from England, brought home a portrait of the sage, which he placed in his collection; and strangers, far and near, came to look on the physiognomy of a great and original thinker. One of the honours which men of genius receive is the homage the public pay to their images: either, like the fat monk, one of the heroes of the EpistolÆ obscurorum Virorum, who, standing before a portrait of Erasmus, spit on it in utter malice; or when they are looked on in silent reverence. It is alike a tribute paid to the masters of intellect. They have had their shrines and pilgrimages.

None of our authors have been better known, nor more highly considered, than our Hobbes, abroad. I find many curious particulars of him and his conversations recorded in French works, which are not known to the English biographers or critics. His residence at Paris occasioned this. See Ancillon’s MÉlange Critique, Basle, 1698; Patin’s Letters, 61; Sorberiana; Niceron, tome iv.; Joly’s Additions to Bayle.—All these contain original notices on Hobbes.

To his Life are additions, which nothing but the self-love of the author could have imagined.

“Amicorum Elenchus.”—He might be proud of the list of foreigners and natives.

“Tractuum contra Hobbium editorum Syllabus.”

“Eorum qui in Scriptis suis Hobbio contradixerunt Indiculus.”

“Qui Hobbii meminerunt seu in bonam seu in sequiorem partem.”

“In Hobbii Defensionem.”—Hobbes died 1679, aged 91. These two editions are, 1681, 1682.

This fact has been recorded in one of the pamphlets of Richard Baxter, who, however, was no well-wisher to our philosopher. “Additional Notes on the life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale,” 1682, p. 40.

“Athen. Oxon.,” vol. ii. p. 665, ed. 1721. No one, however, knew better than Hobbes the vanity and uselessness of words: in one place he compares them to “a spider’s web; for, by contexture of words, tender and delicate wits are insnared and stopped, but strong wits break easily through them.” The pointed sentence with which Warburton closes his preface to Shakspeare, is Hobbes’s—that “words are the counters of the wise, and the money of fools.”

Aubrey has minutely preserved for us the manner in which Hobbes composed his “Leviathan:” it is very curious for literary students. “He walked much, and contemplated; and he had in the head of his cane a pen and inkhorn, and carried always a note-book in his pocket; and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise might have lost it. He had drawn the design of the book into chapters, &c., and he knew whereabouts it would come in. Thus that book was made.”—Vol. ii. p. 607. Aubrey, the little Boswell of his day, has recorded another literary peculiarity, which some authors do not assuredly sufficiently use. Hobbes said that he sometimes would set his thoughts upon researching and contemplating, always with this proviso: “that he very much and deeply considered one thing at a time—for a week, or sometimes a fortnight.”

A small annuity from the Devonshire family, and a small pension from Charles II., exceeded the wants of his philosophic life. If he chose to compute his income, Hobbes says facetiously of himself, in French sols or Spanish maravedis, he could persuade himself that Croesus or Crassus were by no means richer than himself; and when he alludes to his property, he considers wisdom to be his real wealth:—

He gave up his patrimonial estate to his brother, not wanting it himself; but he tells the tale himself, and adds, that though small in extent, it was rich in its crops. Anthony Wood, with unusual delight, opens the character of Hobbes: “Though he hath an ill name from some, and good from others, yet he was a person endowed with an excellent philosophical soul, was a contemner of riches, money, envy, the world, &c.; a severe lover of justice, and endowed with great morals; cheerful, open, and free of his discourse, yet without offence to any, which he endeavoured always to avoid.” What an enchanting picture of the old man in the green vigour of his age has Cowley sent down to us!

Hobbes, in his metrical (by no means his poetical) life, says, the more the “Leviathan” was written against, the more it was read; and adds,

The term arx is here peculiarly fortunate, according to the system of the author—it means a citadel or fortified place on an eminence, to which the people might fly for their common safety.

His works were much read; as appears by “The Court Burlesqued,” a satire attributed to Butler.

Our author, so late as in 1750, was still so commanding a genius, that his works were collected in a handsome folio; but that collection is not complete. When he could not get his works printed at home, he published them in Latin, including his mathematical works, at Amsterdam, by Blaew, 1668, 4to. His treatises, “De Cive,” and “On Human Nature,” are of perpetual value. Gassendi recommends these admirable works, and Puffendorff acknowledges the depth of his obligations. The Life of Hobbes in the “Biographia Britannica,” by Dr. Campbell, is a work of curious research.

The origin of his taste for mathematics was purely accidental: begun in love, it continued to dotage. According to Aubrey, he was forty years old when, “being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open at the 47th Propos. lib. i., which, having read, he swore ‘This is impossible!’ He read the demonstration, which referred him back to another—at length he was convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. I have heard Mr. Hobbes say that he was wont to draw lines on his thighs and on the sheets a-bed.”

The author of the excellent Latin grammar of the English language, so useful to every student in Europe, of which work that singular patriot, Thomas Hollis, printed an edition, to present to all the learned Institutions of Europe. Henry Stubbe, the celebrated physician of Warwick, to whom the reader has been introduced, joined, for he loved a quarrel, in the present controversy, when it involved philosophical matters, siding with Hobbes, because he hated Wallis. In his “Oneirocritica, or an Exact Account of the Grammatical Parts of this Controversy,” he draws a strong character of Wallis, who was indeed a great mathematician, and one of the most extraordinary decypherers of letters; for perhaps no new system of character could be invented for which he could not make a key; by which means he had rendered the most important services to the Parliament. Stubbe quaintly describes him as “the sub-scribe to the tribe of Adoniram” (i.e. Adoniram Byfield, who, with this cant name, was scribe to the fanatical Assembly of Divines), and “as the glory and pride of the Presbyterian faction.”

Dr. Seth Ward, after the Restoration made Bishop of Salisbury, said, some years before this event was expected, that “he had rather be the author of one of Hobbes’s books than be king of England.” But afterwards he seemed not a little inclined to cry out Crucifige! He who, to one of these books, the admirable treatise on “Human Nature,” had prefixed one of the highest panegyrics Hobbes could receive!—Athen. Oxon. vol. ii. p. 647.

It is mortifying to read such language between two mathematicians, in the calm inquiries of square roots, and the finding of mean proportionals between two straight lines. I wish the example may prove a warning. Wallis thus opens on Hobbes:—“It seems, Mr. Hobbs, that you have a mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too old to learn, though you have as much need as those that be younger, and yet will think much to be whipped.

“What moved you to say your lessons in English, when the books against which you do chiefly intend them were written in Latin? Was it chiefly for the perfecting your natural rhetoric whenever you thought it convenient to repair to Billingsgate?—You found that the oyster-women could not teach you to rail in Latin. Now you can, upon all occasion, or without occasion, give the titles of fool, beast, ass, dog, &c., which I take to be but barking; and they are no better than a man might have at Billingsgate for a box o’ the ear.

“You tell us, ‘though the beasts that think our railing to be roaring have for a time admired us; yet now you have showed them our ears, they will be less affrighted.’ Sir, those persons (the professors themselves) needed not the sight of your ears, but could tell by the voice what kind of creature brayed in your books: you dared not have said this to their faces.”—He bitterly says of Hobbes, that “he is a man who is always writing what was answered before he had written.”

Dr. Campbell’s art. on Hobbes, in “Biog. Brit.” p. 2619.

Found in the king’s tent at Naseby, and which were written to the queen on important political subjects, in a cypher of which they only had the key. They were afterwards published in a quarto pamphlet, and did much mischief to the royal cause.—Ed.

The strange conclusions some mathematicians have deduced from their principles concerning the real quantity of matter, and the reality of space, have been noticed by Pope, in the Dunciad:—

The gross convivialities of the times, from the age of Elizabeth, were remarkable for several circumstances. Hard-drinking was a foreign vice, imported by our military men on their return from the Netherlands: and the practice, of whose prevalence Camden complains, was even brought to a kind of science. They had a dialect peculiar to their orgies. See “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. p. 294 (last edition).

Jonson’s inclinations were too well suited to the prevalent taste, and he gave as largely into it as any of his contemporaries. Tavern-habits were then those of our poets and actors. Ben’s Humours, at “the Mermaid,” and at a later period, his Leges Convivales at “the Apollo,” the club-room of “the Devil,” were doubtless one great cause of a small personal unhappiness, of which he complains, and which had a very unlucky effect in rendering a mistress so obdurate, who “through her eyes had stopt her ears.” This was, as his own verse tells us,

He weighed near twenty stone, according to his own avowal—an Elephant-Cupid! One of his “Sons,” at the “Devil,” seems to think that his Catiline could not fail to be a miracle, by a certain sort of inspiration which Ben used on the occasion.

Jonson, in the Bacchic phraseology of the day, was “a Canary-bird.” “He would (says Aubrey) many times exceed in drink; canary was his beloved liquor; then he would tumble home to bed; and when he had thoroughly perspired, then to study.”

Tradition, too, has sent down to us several tavern-tales of “Rare Ben.” A good-humoured one has been preserved of the first interview between Bishop Corbet, when a young man, and our great bard. It occurred at a tavern, where Corbet was sitting alone. Ben, who had probably just drank up to the pitch of good fellowship, desired the waiter to take to the gentleman “a quart of raw wine; and tell him,” he added, “I sacrifice my service to him.”—“Friend,” replied Corbet, “I thank him for his love; but tell him, from me, that he is mistaken; for sacrifices are always burned.” This pleasant allusion to the mulled wine of the time by the young wit could not fail to win the affection of the master-wit himself. Harl. MSS. 6395.

Ben is not viewed so advantageously, in an unlucky fit of ebriety recorded by Oldys, in his MS. notes on Langbaine; but his authority is not to me of a suspicious nature: he had drawn it from a MS. collection of Oldisworth’s, who appears to have been a curious collector of the history of his times. He was secretary to that strange character, Philip, Earl of Pembroke. It was the custom of those times to form collections of little traditional stories and other good things; we have had lately given to us by the Camden Society an amusing one, from the L’Estrange family, and the MS. already quoted is one of them. There could be no bad motive in recording a tale, quite innocent in itself, and which is further confirmed by Isaac Walton, who, without alluding to the tale, notices that Jonson parted from Sir Walter Raleigh and his son “not in cold blood.” Mr. Gifford, in a MS. note on this work, does not credit this story, it not being accordant with dates. Such stories may not accord with dates or persons, and yet may be founded on some substantial fact. I know of no injury to Ben’s poetical character, in showing that he was, like other men, quite incapable of taking care of himself, when he was sunk in the heavy sleep of drunkenness. It was an age when kings, as our James I. and his majesty of Denmark, were as often laid under the table as their subjects. My motive for preserving the story is the incident respecting carrying men in baskets: it was evidently a custom, which perhaps may have suggested the memorable adventure of Falstaff. It was a convenient mode of conveyance for those who were incapable of taking care of themselves before the invention of hackney coaches, which was of later date, in Charles the First’s reign.

Camden recommended Jonson to Sir Walter Raleigh as a tutor to his son, whose gay humours not brooking the severe studies of Jonson, took advantage of his foible, to degrade him in the eyes of his father, who, it seems, was remarkable for his abstinence from wine: though, if another tale be true, he was no common sinner in “the true Virginia.” Young Raleigh contrived to give Ben a surfeit, which threw the poet into a deep slumber; and then the pupil maliciously procured a buck-basket, and a couple of men, who carried our Ben to Sir Walter, with a message that “their young master had sent home his tutor.” There is nothing improbable in the story; for the circumstance of carrying drunken men in baskets was a usual practice. In the Harleian MS. quoted above, I find more than one instance; I will give one. An alderman, carried in a porter’s basket, at his own door, is thrown out of it in a qualmish state. The man, to frighten away the passengers, and enable the grave citizen to creep in unobserved, exclaims, that the man had the falling sickness!

These were Marston and Decker, but as is usual with these sort of caricatures, the originals sometimes mistook their likenesses. They were both town-wits, and cronies, of much the same stamp; by a careful perusal of their works, the editor of Jonson has decided that Marston was Crispinus. With him Jonson had once lived on the most friendly terms: afterwards the great poet quarrelled with both, or they with him.

Dryden, in the preface to his “Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco,” in his quarrel with Settle, which has been sufficiently narrated by Dr. Johnson, felt, when poised against this miserable rival, who had been merely set up by a party to mortify the superior genius, as Jonson had felt when pitched against Crispinus. It is thus that literary history is so interesting to authors. How often, in recording the fates of others, it reflects their own! “I knew indeed (says Dryden) that to write against him was to do him too great an honour; but I considered Ben Jonson had done it before to Decker, our author’s predecessor, whom he chastised in his Poetaster, under the character of Crispinus.” Langbaine tells us the subject of the “Satiromastix” of Decker, which I am to notice, was “the witty Ben Jonson;” and with this agree all the notices I have hitherto met with respecting “the Horace Junior” of Decker’s Satiromastix. Mr. Gilchrist has published two curious pamphlets on Jonson; and in the last, p. 56, he has shown that Decker was “the poet-ape of Jonson,” and that he avenged himself under the character of Crispinus in his “Satiromastix;” to which may be added, that the Fannius, in the same satirical comedy, is probably his friend Marston.

Jonson allowed himself great liberty in personal satire, by which, doubtless, he rung an alarum to a waspish host; he lampooned Inigo Jones, the great machinist and architect. The lampoons are printed in Jonson’s works [but not in their entirety. The great architect had sufficient court influence to procure them to be cancelled; and the character of In-and-in Medley, in “The Tale of a Tub,” has come down to us with no other satirical personal traits than a few fantastical expressions]; and I have in MS. an answer by Inigo Jones, in verse, so pitiful that I have not printed it. That he condescended to bring obscure individuals on the stage, appears by his character of Carlo Buffoon, in Every Man out of his Humour. He calls this “a second untruss,” and was censured for having drawn it from personal revenge. The Aubrey Papers, recently published have given us the character of this Carlo Buffoon, “one Charles Chester, a bold impertinent fellow; and they could never be at quiet for him; a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him, and seals up his mouth; i.e., his upper and nether beard, with hard wax.”—p. 514. Such a character was no unfitting object for dramatic satire. Mr. Gilchrist’s pamphlets defended Jonson from the frequent accusations raised against him for the freedom of his muse, in such portraits after the life. Yet even our poet himself does not deny their truth, while he excuses himself. In the dedication of “The Fox,” to the two Universities, he boldly asks, “Where have I been particular? Where personal?—Except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, buffoon, creatures (for their insolencies) worthy to be taxed.” The mere list he here furnishes us with would serve to crowd one of the “twopenny audiences” in the small theatres of that day.

Alluding, no doubt, to the price of seats at some of the minor theatres.

It was the fashion with the poets connected with the theatre to wear long hair. Nashe censures Greene “for his fond (foolish) disguising of a Master of Arts (which was Greene’s degree) with ruffianly hair.”—Ed.

Alluding to the trial of the Poetasters, which takes place before Augustus and his poetical jury of Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, &c., in Ben’s play.

Decker alludes here to the bastard of Burgundy, who considered himself unmatchable, till he was overthrown in Smithfield by Woodville, Earl Rivers.

Horace acknowledges he played Zulziman at Paris-garden. “Sir Vaughan: Then, master Horace, you played the part of an honest man—”

Tucca exclaims: “Death of Hercules! he could never play that part well in ’s life!”

Among those arts of imitation which man has derived from the practice of animals, naturalists assure us that he owes the use of clysters to the Egyptian Ibis. There are some who pretend this medicinal invention comes from the stork. The French are more like Ibises than we are: ils se donnent des lavements eux-mÊmes. But as it is rather uncertain what the Egyptian Ibis is; whether, as translated in Leviticus xi. 17, the cormorant, or a species of stork, or only “a great owl,” as we find in Calmet; it would be safest to attribute the invention to the unknown bird. I recollect, in Wickliffe’s version of the Pentateuch, which I once saw in MS. in the possession of my valued friend Mr. Douce, that that venerable translator interpolates a little, to tell us that the Ibis “giveth to herself a purge.”

This work was not given to the public till 1724, a small quarto, with a fine portrait of Brooke. More than a century had elapsed since its forcible suppression. Anstis printed it from the fair MS. which Brooke had left behind him. The author’s paternal affection seemed fondly to imagine its child might be worthy of posterity, though calumniated by its contemporaries.

“Verum enimverÒ de his et hoc genere hominum ne verbum amplius addam, tabellam tamen summi illius artificis Apellis, cÙm colorum vivacitate depingere non possim, verbis leviter adumbrabo et proponam, ut Antiphilus noster, suique similes, et qui calumniis credunt, hanc, et in hac seipsos semel simulque intueantur.

“Ad dextram sedet quidam, quia credulus, auribus prÆlongis insignis, quales ferÈ illÆ MidÆ feruntur. Manum porrigit procul accedenti CalumniÆ. Circumstant eum mulierculÆ duÆ, Ignorantia ac Suspicio. Adit aliunde propiÙs Calumnia eximiÈ compta, vultu ipso et gestu corporis efferens rabiem, et iram Æstuanti conceptam pectore prÆ se ferens: sinistra facem tenens flammantem, dextra secum adolescentem capillis arreptum, manus ad superos tendentem, obtestantemque immortalium deorum fidem, trahit. Anteit vir pallidus, in specium impurus, acie oculorum minimÈ hebeti, cÆterÙm planÈ iis sÍmilis, qui gravi aliquo morbo contabuerunt. Hic livor est, ut facilÈ conjicias. Quin, et mulierculÆ aliquot InsidiÆ et FallaciÆ ut comites Calumniam comitantur. Harum est munus, dominam hortari, instruere, comere, et subornare. A tergo, habitu lugubri, pullato, laceroque Poenitentia subsequitur, quÆ capite in tergum deflexo, cum lachrymis, ac pudore procul venientem Veritatem agnoscit, et excipit.”

A Fletcher is a maker of bows and arrows.—Ash.

Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told the reader:—

Brooke was originally a painter-stainer. His enmity to Camden appears to have originated in the appointment of the latter to the office of Clarencieux on the death of Richard Lee; he believing himself to be qualified for the place by greater knowledge, and by his long connexion with the College of Arms. His mode of righting himself lacked judgment, and he was twice suspended from his office, and was even attempted to be expelled therefrom.—Ed.

In Anstis’s edition of “A Second Discoverie of Errors in the Much-commended ‘Britannia,’ &c.,” 1724, the reader will find all the passages in the “Britannia” of the edition of 1594 to which Brooke made exceptions, placed column-wise with the following edition of it in 1600. It is, as Anstis observes, a debt to truth, without making any reflections.

There is a sensible observation in the old “Biographia Britannica” on Brooke. “From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the ‘Britannia’ arose very great advantages to the public, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of our nobility, than had been given at that time of those in any other country of Europe.”—p. 1135.

The Church History by Dodd, a Catholic, fills three vols. folio: it is very rare and curious. Much of our own domestic history is interwoven in that of the fugitive papists, and the materials of this work are frequently drawn from their own archives, preserved in their seminaries at Douay, Valladolid, &c., which have not been accessible to Protestant writers. Here I discovered a copious nomenclature of eminent persons, and many literary men, with many unknown facts, both of a private and public nature. It is useful, at times, to know whether an English author was a Catholic.

I refer the reader to Selden’s “Table Talk” for many admirable ideas on “Bishops.” That enlightened genius, who was no friend to the ecclesiastical temporal power, acknowledges the absolute necessity of this order in a great government. The preservers of our literature and our morals they ought to be, and many have been. When the political reformers ejected the bishops out of the house, what did they gain? a more vulgar prating race, but even more lordly! Selden says—“The bishops being put out of the house, whom will they lay the fault upon now? When the dog is beat out of the room, where will they lay the stink?”

The freedom of the press hardly subsisted in Elizabeth’s reign; and yet libels abounded! A clear demonstration that nothing is really gained by those violent suppressions and expurgatory indexes which power in its usurpation may enforce. At a time when they did not dare even to publish the titles of such libels, yet were they spread about, and even hoarded. The most ancient catalogue of our vernacular literature is that by Andrew Maunsell, published in 1595. It consists of Divinity, Mathematics, Medicine, &c.; but the third part which he promised, and which to us would have been the most interesting, of “Rhetoric, History, Poetry, and Policy,” never appeared. In the Preface, such was the temper of the times, and of Elizabeth, we discover that he has deprived us of a catalogue of the works alluded to in our text, for he thus distinctly points at them:—“The books written by the fugitive papistes, as also those that are written against the present government (meaning those of the Puritans), I doe not think meete for me to meddle withall.” In one part of his catalogue, however, he contrived to insert the following passage; the burden of the song seems to have been chorused by the ear of our cautious Maunsell. He is noticing a Pierce Plowman in prose. “I did not see the beginning of this booke, but it ended thus:—

Few of our native productions are so rare as the Martin Mar-Prelate publications. I have not found them in the public repositories of our national literature. There they have been probably rejected with indignity, though their answerers have been preserved; yet even these are almost of equal rarity and price. They were rejected in times less enlightened than the present. In a national library every book deserves preservation. By the rejection of these satires, however absurd or infamous, we have lost a link in the great chain of our National Literature and History. [Since the above was written, many have been added to our library; and the Rev. William Maskell, M.A., has published his “History of the Martin Mar-Prelate Controversy.” It is a most careful summary of the writings and proceedings of all connected with this important event, and is worthy the attentive perusal of such as desire accurate information in this chapter of our Church history.]

We know them by the name of Puritans, a nickname obtained by their affecting superior sanctity; but I find them often distinguished by the more humble appellative of Precisians. As men do not leap up, but climb on rocks, it is probable they were only precise before they were pure. A satirist of their day, in “Rythmes against Martin Marre-Prelate,” melts their attributes into one verse:—

A more laughing satirist, “Pasquill of England to Martin Junior,” persists in calling them Puritans, a pruritu! for their perpetual itching, or a desire to do something. Elizabeth herself only considered them as “a troublesome sort of people:” even that great politician could not detect the political monster in a mere chrysalis of reform. I find, however, in a poet of the Elizabethan age, an evident change in the public feeling respecting the Puritans, who being always most active when the government was most in trouble, their political views were discovered. Warner, in his “Albion’s England,” describes them:—

The gentle-humoured Fuller, in his “Church History,” felt a tenderness for the name of Puritan, which, after the mad follies they had played during the Commonwealth, was then held in abhorrence. He could not venture to laud the good men of that party, without employing a new term to conceal the odium. In noticing, under the date of 1563, that the bishops urged the clergy of their dioceses to press uniformity, &c., he adds—“Such as refused were branded with the name of Puritans—a name which in this nation began in this year, subject to several senses, and various in the acceptions. Puritan was taken for the opposers of hierarchy and church service, as resenting of superstition. But the nickname was quickly improved by profane mouths to abuse pious persons. We will decline the word to prevent exceptions, which, if casually slipping from our pen, the reader knoweth that only nonconformists are intended,” lib. ix. p. 76. Fuller, however, divided them into classes—“the mild and moderate, and the fierce and fiery.” Heylin, in his “History of the Presbyterians,” blackens them as so many political devils; and Neale, in his “History of the Puritans,” blanches them into a sweet and almond whiteness.

Let us be thankful to these Puritans for a political lesson. They began their quarrels on the most indifferent matters. They raised disturbances about the “Romish Rags,” by which they described the decent surplice as well as the splendid scarlet chimere[407] thrown over the white linen rochet, with the square cap worn by the bishops. The scarlet robe, to please their sullen fancy, was changed into black satin; but these men soon resolved to deprive the bishops of more than a scarlet robe. The affected niceties of these Precisians, dismembering our images, and scratching at our paintings, disturbed the uniformity of the religious service. A clergyman in a surplice was turned out of the church. Some wore square caps, some round, some abhorred all caps. The communion-table placed in the East was considered as an idolatrous altar, and was now dragged into the middle of the church, where, to show their contempt, it was always made the filthiest seat in the church. They used to kneel at the sacrament; now they would sit, because that was a proper attitude for a supper; then they would not sit, but stand: at length they tossed the elements about, because the bread was wafers, and not from a loaf. Among their preciseness was a qualm at baptism: the water was to be taken from a basin, and not from a fount; then they would not name their children, or if they did, they would neither have Grecian, nor Roman, nor Saxon names, but Hebrew ones, which they ludicrously translated into English, and which, as Heylin observes, “many of them when they came of age were ashamed to own”—such as “Accepted, Ashes, Fight-the-good-Fight-of-Faith, Joy-again, Kill-sin, &c.”

Who could have foreseen that some pious men quarrelling about the square caps and the rochets of bishops should at length attack bishops themselves; and, by an easy transition, passing from bishops to kings, finally close in levellers!

The origin of the controversy may be fixed about 1588. “A far less easy task,” says the Rev. Mr. Maskell, “is it to guess at the authors. The tracts on the Mar-Prelate side have been usually attributed to Penry, Throgmorton, Udal, and Fenner. Very considerable information may be obtained about these writers in Wood’s ‘AthenÆ,’ art. Penry; in Collier, Strype, and Herbert’s edition of ‘Arnes,’ to whom I would refer. After a careful examination of these and other authorities on the subject, the question remains, in my judgment, as obscure as before; and I think that it is very far from clear that either one of the three last-named was actually concerned in the authorship of any of the pamphlets.”—Ed.

So Heylin writes the word; but in the “Rythmes against Martin,” a contemporary production, the term is Chiver. It is not in Cotgrave.

In the “Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior” (circÆ 1589), we are told: “There is Cartwright, too, at Warwick; he hath got him such a company of disciples, both of the worshipfull and other of the poorer sort, as wee have no cause to thank him. Never tell me that he is too grave to trouble himself with Martin’s conceits. Cartwright seeks the peace of the Church no otherwise than his platform may stand.” He was accused before the commissioners in 1590 of knowing who wrote and printed these squibs, which he did not deny.—Ed.

I give a remarkable extract from the writings of Cartwright. It will prove two points. First, that the religion of those men became a cover for a political design; which was to raise the ecclesiastical above the civil power. Just the reverse of Hobbes’s after scheme; but while theorists thus differ and seem to refute one another, they in reality work for an identical purpose. Secondly, it will show the not uncommon absurdity of man; while these nonconformists were affecting to annihilate the hierarchy of England as a remains of the Romish supremacy, they themselves were designing one according to their own fresher scheme. It was to be a state or republic of Presbyters, in which all Sovereigns were to hold themselves, to use their style, as “Nourisses, or servants under the Church; the Sovereigns were to be as subjects; they were to vail their sceptres and to offer their crowns as the prophet speaketh, to lick the dust of the feet of the Church.” These are Cartwright’s words, in his “Defence of the Admonition.” But he is still bolder, in a joint production with Travers. He insists that “the Monarchs of the World should give up their sceptres and crowns unto him (Jesus Christ) who is represented by the Officers of the Church.” See “A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline,” p. 185. One would imagine he was a disguised Jesuit, and an advocate for the Pope’s supremacy. But observe how these saintly Republicans would govern the State. Cartwright is explicit, and very ingenious. “The world is now deceived that thinketh that the Church must be framed according to the Commonwealth, and the Church Government according to the Civil Government, which is as much as to say, as if a man should fashion his house according to his hangings; whereas, indeed, it is clean contrary. That as the hangings are made fit for the house, so the Commonwealth must be made to agree with the Church, and the government thereof with her government; for, as the house is before the hangings, therefore the hangings, which come after, must be framed to the house, which was before; so the Church being before there was a commonwealth, and the commonwealth coming after, must be fashioned and made suitable to the Church; otherwise, God is made to give place to men, heaven to earth.”—Cartwright’s Defence of the Admonition, p. 181.

Warburton’s “Alliance between Church and State,” which was in his time considered as a hardy paradox, is mawkish in its pretensions, compared with this sacerdotal republic. It is not wonderful that the wisest of our Sovereigns, that great politician Elizabeth, should have punished with death these democrats: but it is wonderful to discover that these inveterate enemies to the Church of Rome were only trying to transfer its absolute power into their own hands! They wanted to turn the Church into a democracy. They fascinated the people by telling them that there would be no beggars were there no bishops; that every man would be a governor by setting up a Presbytery. From the Church, I repeat, it is scarcely a single step to the Cabinet. Yet the early Puritans come down to us as persecuted saints. Doubtless, there were a few honest saints among them; but they were as mad politicians as their race afterwards proved to be, to whom they left so many fatal legacies. Cartwright uses the very language a certain cast of political reformers have recently done. He declares “An establishment may be made without the magistrate;” and told the people that “if every hair of their head was a life, it ought to be offered for such a cause.” Another of this faction is for “registering the names of the fittest and hottest brethren without lingering for Parliament;” and another exults that “there are a hundred thousand hands ready.” Another, that “we may overthrow the bishops and all the government in one day.” Such was the style, and such the confidence in the plans which the lowest orders of revolutionists promulgated during their transient exhibition in this country. More in this strain may be found in “Maddox’s Vindication Against Neale,” the advocate for the Puritans, p. 255; and in an admirable letter of that great politician, Sir Francis Walsingham, who, with many others of the ministers of Elizabeth, was a favourer of the Puritans, till he detected their secret object to subvert the government. This letter is preserved in “Collier’s Eccl. Hist.” vol. ii. 607. They had begun to divide the whole country into classes, provincial synods, &c. They kept registers, which recorded all the heads of their debates, to be finally transmitted to the secret head of the Classis of Warwick, where Cartwright governed as the perpetual moderator! Heylin’s Hist. of Presbyt. p. 277. These violent advocates for the freedom of the press had, however, an evident intention to monopolise it; for they decreed that “no book should be put in print but by consent of the Classes.”—Sir G. Paul’s Life of Whitgift, p. 65. The very Star-Chamber they justly protested against, they were for raising among themselves!

Under the denomination of Barrowists and Brownists. I find Sir Walter Raleigh declaring, in the House of Commons, on a motion for reducing disloyal subjects, that “they are worthy to be rooted out of a Commonwealth.” He is alarmed at the danger, “for it is to be feared that men not guilty will be included in the law about to be passed. I am sorry for it. I am afraid there is near twenty thousand of them in England; and when they be gone (that is, expelled) who shall maintain their wives and children?”—Sir Simonds D’Ewes’ Journal, p. 517.

The controversies of Whitgift and Cartwright were of a nature which could never close, for toleration was a notion which never occurred to either. These rivals from early days wrote with such bitterness against each other, that at length it produced mutual reproaches. Whitgift complains to Cartwright: “If you were writing against the veriest Papist, or the ignorantest dolt, you could not be more spiteful and malicious.” And Cartwright replies: “If peace had been so precious unto you as you pretend, you would not have brought so many hard words and bitter reproaches, as it were sticks and coals, to double and treble the heat of contention.”

After this it is curious, even to those accustomed to such speculations, to observe some men changing with the times, and furious rivals converted into brothers. Whitgift, whom Elizabeth, as a mark of her favour, called “her black husband,” soliciting Cartwright’s pardon from the Queen; and the proud Presbyter Cartwright styling Whitgift his Lord the Archbishop’s Grace of Canterbury, and visiting him!

Sir George Paul, a contemporary, attributes his wealth “to the benevolence and bounty of his followers.” Dr. Sutcliffe, one of his adversaries, sharply upbraids him, that “in the persecution he perpetually complained of, he was grown rich.” A Puritan advocate reproves Dr. Sutcliffe for always carping at Cartwright’s purchases:—“Why may not Cartwright sell the lands he had from his father, and buy others with the money, as well as some of the bishops, who by bribery, simony, extortion, racking of rents, wasting of woods, and such like stratagems, wax rich, and purchase great lordships for their posterity?”

To this Sutcliffe replied:

“I do not carpe alway, no, nor once, at Master Cartwright’s purchase. I hinder him not; I envy him not. Only thus much I must tell him, that Thomas Cartwright, a man that hath more landes of his own in possession than any bishop that I know, and that fareth daintily every day, and feedeth fayre and fatte, and lyeth as soft as any tenderling of that brood, and hath wonne much wealth in short time, and will leave more to his posterity than any bishop, should not cry out either of persecution or of excess of bishop’s livinges.”—Sutcliffe’s Answer to Certain Calumnious Petitions.

“The author of these libels,” says Bishop Cooper, in his “Admonition to the People of England,” 1589, “calleth himself by a feigned name, Martin Mar-Prelate, a very fit name undoubtedly. But if this outrageous spirit of boldness be not stopped speedily, I fear he will prove himself to be, not only Mar-Prelate, but Mar-Prince, Mar-State, Mar-Law, Mar-Magistrate, and altogether, until he bring it to an Anabaptistical equality and community.”—Ed.

Cartwright approved of them, and well knew the concealed writers, who frequently consulted him: this appears by Sir G. Paul’s “Life of Whitgift,” p. 65. Being asked his opinion of such books, he said, that “since the bishops, and others there touched, would not amend by grave books, it was therefore meet they should be dealt withal to their farther reproach; and that some books must be earnest, some more mild and temperate, whereby they may be both of the spirit of Elias and Eliseus;” the one the great mocker, the other the more solemn reprover. It must be confessed Cartwright here discovers a deep knowledge of human nature. He knew the power of ridicule and of invective. At a later day, a writer of the same stamp, in “The Second Wash, or the Moore Scoured once more,” (written against Dr. Henry More, the Platonist), in defence of that vocabulary of names which he has poured on More, asserts it is a practice allowed by the high authority of Christ himself. I transcribe the curious passage:—“It is the practice of Christ himself to character men by those things to which they assimilate. Thus hath he called Herod a fox; Judas a devil; false pastors he calls wolves; the buyers and sellers, theeves; and those Hebrew Puritans the Pharisees, hypocrites. This rule and justice of his Master St. Paul hath well observed, and he acts freely thereby; for when he reproves the Cretians, he makes use of that ignominious proverb, Evil beasts and slow bellies. When the high priest commanded the Jews to smite him on the face, he replied to him, not without some bitterness, God shall smite thee, thou white wall. I cite not these places to justify an injurious spleen, but to argue the liberty of the truth.”—The Second Wash, or the Moore Scoured once more. 1651. P. 8.

One of their works is “A Dialogue, wherein is laid open the tyrannical dealing of L. Bishopps against God’s children.” It is full of scurrilous stories, probably brought together by two active cobblers who were so useful to their junto. Yet the bishops of that day were not of dissolute manners; and the accusations are such, that it only proves their willingness to raise charges against them. Of one bishop they tell us, that after declaring he was poor, and what expenses he had been at, as Paul’s church could bear witness, shortly after hanged four of his servants for having robbed him of a considerable sum. Of another, who cut down all the woods at Hampstead, till the towns-women “fell a swaddling of his men,” and so saved Hampstead by their resolution. But when Martin would give a proof that the Bishop of London was one of the bishops of the devil, in his “Pistle to the terrible priests,” he tells this story:—“When the bishop throws his bowl (as he useth it commonly upon the Sabbath-day), he runnes after it; and if it be too hard, he cries Rub! rub! rub! the diuel goe with thee! and he goeth himself with it; so that by these words he names himself the Bishop of the Divel, and by his tirannical practice prooveth himselfe to be.” He tells, too, of a parson well known, who, being in the pulpit, and “hearing his dog cry, he out with this text: ‘Why, how now, hoe! can you not let my dog alone there? Come, Springe! come, Springe!’ and whistled the dog to the pulpit.” One of their chief objects of attack was Cooper, Bishop of Lincoln, a laborious student, but married to a dissolute woman, whom the University of Oxford offered to separate from him: but he said he knew his infirmity, and could not live without his wife, and was tender on the point of divorce. He had a greater misfortune than even this loose woman about him—his name could be punned on; and this bishop may be placed among that unlucky class of authors who have fallen victims to their names. Shenstone meant more than he expressed, when he thanked God that he could not be punned on. Mar-Prelate, besides many cruel hits at Bishop Cooper’s wife, was now always “making the Cooper’s hoops to flye off, and the bishop’s tubs to leake out.” In “The Protestatyon of Martin Marprelat,” where he tells of two bishops, “who so contended in throwing down elmes, as if the wager had bene whether of them should most have impoverished their bishopricks. Yet I blame not Mar-Elme so much as Cooper for this fact, because it is no less given him by his name to spoil elmes, than it is allowed him by the secret judgment of God to mar the Church. A man of Cooper’s age and occupation, so wel seene in that trade, might easily knowe that tubs made of green timber must needs leak out; and yet I do not so greatly marvel; for he that makes no conscience to be a deceiver in the building of the churche, will not stick for his game to be a deceitfull workeman in making of tubbs.”—p. 19. The author of the books against Bishop Cooper is said to have been Job Throckmorton, a learned man, affecting raillery and humour to court the mob.

Such was the strain of ribaldry and malice which Martin Mar-Prelate indulged, and by which he obtained full possession of the minds of the people for a considerable time. His libels were translated, and have been often quoted by the Roman Catholics abroad and at home for their particular purposes, just as the revolutionary publications in this country have been concluded abroad to be the general sentiments of the people of England; and thus our factions always will serve the interests of our enemies. Martin seems to have written little verse; but there is one epigram worth preserving for its bitterness.

Martin Senior, in his “Reproofe of Martin Junior,” complains that “his younger brother has not taken a little paines in ryming with Mar-Martin (one of their poetical antagonists), that the Cater-Caps may know how the meanest of my father’s sonnes is able to answeare them both at blunt and sharpe.” He then gives his younger brother a specimen of what he is hereafter to do. He attributes the satire of Mar-Martin to Dr. Bridges, Dean of Sarum, and John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury.

It would, however, appear that these revolutionary publications reached the universities, and probably fermented “the green heads” of our students, as the following grave admonition directed to them evidently proves:—

“Anti-Martinus sive monitio cujusdam Londinensis ad adolescentes vtrimque academiÆ contra personatum quendam rabulam qui se AnglicÈ Martin Marprelat, &c. Londini, 1589, 4^o.”

A popular favourite as he was, yet even Martin, in propria persona, acknowledges that his manner was not approved of by either party. His “Theses MartinianÆ” opens thus: “I see my doings and my course misliked of many, both the good and the bad; though also I have favourers of both sortes. The bishops and their traine, though they stumble at the cause, yet especially mislike my maner of writing. Those whom foolishly men call Puritanes, like of the matter I have handled, but the forme they cannot brooke. So that herein I have them both for mine adversaries. But now what if I should take the course in certain theses or conclusions, without inveighing against either person or cause.” This was probably written after Martin had swallowed some of his own sauce, or taken his “Pap (offered to him) with a Hatchet,” as one of the most celebrated government pamphlets is entitled. But these “Theses MartinianÆ,” without either scurrility or invective are the dullest things imaginable; abstract propositions were not palatable to the multitude; and then it was, after the trial had been made, that Martin Junior and Senior attempted to revive the spirit of the old gentleman; but if sedition has its progress, it has also its decline; and if it could not strike its blow when strongest, it only puled and made grimaces, prognostics of weakness and dissolution. This is admirably touched in “Pappe with an Hatchet.” “Now Old Martin appeared, with a wit worn into the socket, twingling and pinking like the snuffe of a candle; quantum mutatus ab illo, how unlike the knave he was before, not for malice, but for sharpnesse! The hogshead was even come to the hauncing, and nothing could be drawne from him but dregs; yet the emptie caske sounds lowder than when it was full, and protests more in his waining than he could performe in his waxing. I drew neere the sillie soul, whom I found quivering in two sheets of protestation paper (alluding to the work mentioned here in the following note). O how meager and leane he looked, so crest falne that his combe hung downe to his bill; and had I not been sure it was the picture of Envie, I should have sworn it had been the image of Death: so like the verie anatomie of Mischief, that one might see through all the ribbes of his conscience.”

In another rare pamphlet from the same school, “Pasquill of England to Martin Junior, in a countercuffe given to Martin Junior,” he humorously threatens to write “The Owle’s Almanack, wherein your night labours be set down;” and “some fruitful volumes of ‘The Lives of the Saints,’ which, maugre your father’s five hundred sons, shall be printed,” with “hays, jiggs, and roundelays, and madrigals, serving for epitaphs for his father’s hearse.”

“Pasquill of England to Martin Junior, in a countercuffe given to Martin Junior.”

“Most of the books under Martin’s name were composed by John Penry, John Udall, John Field, and Job Throckmorton, who all concurred in making Martin. See ‘Answer to Throgmorton’s Letter by Sutcliffe,’ p. 70; ‘More Work for a Cooper;’ and ‘Hay any Work for a Cooper;’ and ‘Some layd open in his Colours;’ were composed by Job Throckmorton.”—MS. Note by Thomas Baker. Udall, indeed, denied having any concern in these invectives, and professed to disapprove of them. We see Cartwright, however, of quite a different opinion. In Udall’s library some MS. notes had been seen by a person who considered them as materials for a Martin Mar-Prelate work in embryo, which Udall confessed were written “by a friend.” All the writers were silenced ministers; though it is not improbable that their scandalous tales, and much of the ribaldry, might have been contributed by their lowest retainers, those purveyors for the mob, of what they lately chose to call their “Pig’s-meat.”

The execution of Hacket, and condemnation of his party, who had declared him “King of Europe,” so that England was only a province to him, is noted in our “General History of England.” This was the first serious blow which alarmed the Puritanic party. Doubtless, this man was a mere maniac, and his ferocious passions broke out early in life; but, in that day, they permitted no lunacy as a plea for any politician. Cartwright held an intercourse with that party, as he had with Barrow, said to have been a debauched youth; yet we had a sect of Barrowists; and Robert Brown, the founder of another sect, named after him Brownists; which became very formidable. This Brown, for his relationship, was patronised by Cecil, Earl of Burleigh. He was a man of violent passions. He had a wife, with whom he never lived; and a church, wherein he never preached, observes the characterising Fuller, who knew him when Fuller was young. In one of the pamphlets of the time I have seen, it is mentioned that being reproached with beating his wife, he replied, “I do not beat Mrs. Brown as my wife, but as a curst cross old woman.” He closed his life in prison; not for his opinions, but for his brutality to a constable. The old women and the cobblers connected with these Martin Mar-Prelates are noticed in the burlesque epitaphs on Martin’s death, supposed to be made by his favourites; a humorous appendix to “Martin’s Monthminde.” Few political conspiracies, whenever religion forms a pretext, is without a woman. One Dame Lawson is distinguished, changing her “silke for sacke;” and other names might be added of ladies. Two cobblers are particularly noticed as some of the industrious purveyors of sedition through the kingdom—Cliffe, the cobbler, and one Newman. Cliffe’s epitaph on his friend Martin is not without humour:—

Nor is Newman, the other cobbler, less mortified and pathetic. “The London Corresponding Society” had a more ancient origin than that sodality was aware.

Among the Martin Mar-Prelate books was one entitled “The Cobbler’s Book.” This I have not seen; but these cobblers probably picked up intelligence for these scandalous chronicles. The writers, too, condescended to intersperse the cant dialect of the populace, with which the cobblers doubtless assisted these learned men, when busied in their buffoonery. Hence all their vulgar gibberish; the Shibboleth of the numerous class of their admirers—such as, “O, whose tat?” John Kankerbury, for Canterbury; Paltri-politans, for Metropolitans; See Villains, for Civilians; and Doctor of Devility, for Divinity! and more of this stamp. Who could imagine that the writers of these scurrilities were learned men, and that their patrons were men of rank! We find two knights heavily fined for secreting these books in their cellars. But it is the nature of rebellion to unite the two extremes; for want stirs the populace to rise, and excess the higher orders. This idea is admirably expressed in one of our elder poets:—

The writer of Algernon Sidney’s Memoirs could not have known this fact, or he would not have said that “this was the first indictment of high treason upon which any man lost his life for writing anything without publishing it.”—Edit. 1751, p. 21. It is curious to have Sidney’s own opinion on this point. We discover this on his trial. He gives it, assuming one of his own noble principles, not likely to have been allowed by the wretched Tories of that day. Addressing the villanous Jeffries, the Lord Chief Justice:—“My Lord, I think it is a right of mankind, and ’tis exercised by all studious men, to write, in their own closets, what they please, for their own memory; and no man can be answerable for it, unless they publish it.” Jeffries replied:—“Pray don’t go away with that right of mankind, that it is lawful for me to write what I will in my own closet, so I do not publish it. We must not endure men to talk thus, that by the right of nature every man may contrive mischief in his own chamber, and is not to be punished till he thinks fit to be called to it.” Jeffries was a profligate sophist, but his talents were as great as his vices.

Penry’s unfinished petition, which he designed to have presented to the Queen before the trial, is a bold and energetic composition; his protestation, after the trial, a pathetic prayer! Neale has preserved both in his “History of the Puritans.” With what simplicity of eloquence he remonstrates on the temporising government of Elizabeth. He thus addresses the Queen, under the title of Madam!—“Your standing is, and has been, by the Gospel: it is little beholden to you for anything that appears. The practice of your government shows that if you could have ruled without the Gospel, it would have been doubtful whether the Gospel should be established or not; for now that you are established in your throne by the Gospel, you suffer it to reach no farther than the end of your sceptre limiteth unto it.” Of a milder, and more melancholy cast, is the touching language, when the hope of life, but not the firmness of his cause had deserted him. “I look not to live this week to an end. I never took myself for a rebuker, much less for a reformer of states and kingdoms. I never did anything in this cause for contention, vainglory, or to draw disciples after me. Great things, in this life, I never sought for: sufficiency I had, with great outward trouble; but most content I was with my lot, and content with my untimely death, though I leave behind me a friendless widow and four infants.”—Such is often the pathetic cry of the simple-hearted, who fall the victims to the political views of more designing heads.

We could hardly have imagined that this eloquent and serious young man was that Martin Mar-Prelate who so long played the political ape before the populace, with all the mummery of their low buffoonery, and even mimicking their own idioms. The populace, however, seems to have been divided in their opinions respecting the sanity of his politics, as appears by some ludicrous lines, made on Penry’s death, by a northern rhymer.

Observe what different conclusions are drawn from the same fact by opposite writers. Heylin, arguing that Udall had been justly condemned, adds, “the man remained a living monument of the archbishop’s extraordinary goodness to him in the preserving of that life which by the law he had forfeited.” But Neale, on the same point, considers him as one who “died for his conscience, and stands upon record as a monument of the oppression and cruelty of the government.” All this opposition of feeling is of the nature of party-spirit; but what is more curious in the history of human nature, is the change of opinion in the same family in the course of the same generation. The son of this Udall was as great a zealot for Conformity, and as great a sufferer for it from his father’s party, when they possessed political power. This son would not submit to their oaths and covenants, but, with his bedridden wife, was left unmercifully to perish in the open streets,—Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy, part ii. p. 178.

In Herbert’s “Typographical Antiquities,” p. 1689, this tract is intituled, “A Whip for an Ape, or Martin Displaied.” I have also seen the poem with this title. Readers were then often invited to an old book by a change of title: in some cases, I think the same work has been published with several titles.

Martin was a name for a bird, and a cant term for an Ass; and, as it appears here, an Ape. Our Martins, considered as birds, were often reminded that their proper food was “hempen seed,” which at length choked them. That it meant an Ass, appears from “Pappe with a Hatchet.” “Be thou Martin the bird or Martin the beast, a bird with the longest bill, or a beast with the longest ears, there’s a net spread for your neck.”—Sign. B. 5. There is an old French proverb, quoted by Cotgrave, voce Martin:—“Plus d’un ASNE À la foire, a nom Martin.”

Martin was a protÉgÉ of this Dame Lawson. There appear to have been few political conspiracies without a woman, whenever religion forms a part. This dame is thus noticed in the mock epitaphs on Martin’s funeral—

“Sir Jeffrie’s Ale-tub” alludes to two knights who were ruinously fined, and hardly escaped with life, for their patronage of Martin.

Chwere, i.e. “that I were,” alluding to their frequently adopting the corrupt phraseology of the populace, to catch the ears of the mob.

It is a singular coincidence that Arnauld, in his caustic retort on the Jesuits, said—“I do not fear your pen, but your penknife.” The play on the word, tells even better in our language than in the original—plume and canife.

I know of only one Laneham, who wrote “A Narrative of the Queen’s Visit at Kenilworth Castle,” 1575. He was probably a redoubtable satirist. I do not find his name in Ritson’s “Bibliographia Poetica.”

Alluding to the title of one of their most virulent libels against Bishop Cooper [“Hay any worke for Cooper,” which was a pun on the Bishop’s name, conveyed in the street cry of an itinerant trader, and was followed by another entitled] “More work for a Cooper.” Cooper, in his “Admonition to the People of England,” had justly observed that this Mar-Prelate ought to have many other names. See note, p. 510.

I will close this note with an extract from “Pappe with a Hatchet,” which illustrates the ill effects of all sudden reforms, by an apposite and original image.

“There was an aged man that lived in a well-ordered Commonwealth by the space of threescore years, and finding, at the length, that by the heate of some men’s braines, and the warmness of other men’s blood, that newe alterations were in hammering, and that it grewe to such an height, that all the desperate and discontented persons were readie to runne their heads against their head; comming into the midst of these mutiners, cried, as loude as his yeeres would allow:—‘Springalls, and vnripened youthes, whose wisedomes are yet in the blade, when this snowe shall be melted (laying his hand on his siluer haires) then shall you find store of dust, and rather wish for the continuance of a long frost, than the incomming of an vntimely thaw.’”—Sig. D. 3. verso.

Lansdowne MSS. 1042-1316.

Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works, vol. i. 243.

Walpole’s Memoirs, vol. iii. 40.

The Life of Wood, by Gutch, vol. i.

Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes.

“Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. p. 303-4.